s'?' 



,'^* 



V 'p. 



^.\^' 






%-. 






\# 



\0 <' 






-^«<^^- 
\^^' "^^ 









:'--y 






.o*~ 









-0^ 



r^ V 



.o-.s-;/., "^c^^^" 



^■^' '■ 






-^- 






.^ s.^\L 



'"^' .# 
s^^. 



:% 



-,o- 



x^^"^^. 






o 



v^ 



;C^ ^c^. 









.^ 






.0 






^ - • \^ 





















^x ° 






<=0 



,0 




-Nv 



y -^ 



.\\ 






,0o 









.^<^ 



\V ■-r> 




i^^ ^ K^ "^ 



,0 0, 



/. 













5 rt^'- ■■ ' ' 






, -\ s .;,■ <r^^ 



', C' 






■ilf% 



--=^^,-L^ 



.-^^ • ^ ' 





\^-^ 


.,0 


% 


<f 




,x^^' 


'"■r. 





' 9 1 A ■ 



^^^^A)/, 



V^'. 






:.'''^-\.<^ 







O 0' 



xAV' 












. ^ /\ 









Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/narrativesofsorcOOwrig 



NARRATIVES 



OF 



SORCERY AND MAGIC, 



/mm tjiB mnst ^tntliratii: §uxm. 



THOMAS WRIGHT, M.A., F.S.A., 

I ; 
CORRESPONDING MEMBER OP THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OP FRANCE, 
(ACADEMIE DES INSCRIPTIONS ET BELLES LETTRES.) 




REDFIELD, 

CLINTON HALL, NEW YORK. 
1852. 







W. L. Shoemaker 
18 W 



TO 

LORD LONDESBOROUGH. 



My Lord : The interest which your lordship has always taken 
in historical studies, has encouraged me to offer to you this vol- 
ume of what may be truly considered as the dark features of 
history. It appears to me that these are features on which some- 
times at least we ought to dwell, and which it has been too much 
the fashion with historical writers to conceal from view, and I 
am not sure if we are not at this moment suffering from the re- 
sults of that concealment. It is true that if, in tracing the his- 
tory of declining Rome, we pass gently over the crimes of a 
Caligula or a Commodus, if we show the bright side of the his- 
tory of the middle ages and hide their viciousness and brutality, 
if we tell the story of Romanism without its arrogance, its per- 
secutions, and its massacres, or if we attempt to trace the prog- 
ress of society from darkness to light, without entering into the 
details of those strange hallucinations which have at times dis- 
figured and impeded it — such as are related in the following nar- 
ratives — in acting thus we spare the reader much that is horri- 
ble and revolting to his better feelings, but at the same time time 
we destroy the moral and utility of history itself. 

If I mistake not, the history presented in this volume furnishes 
more than any other, an example of the manner in which the 
public mind may, under particular circumstances, be acted upon 
by erroneous views. The paganism of our forefathers, instead 
of being eradicated by papal Rome, was preserved as a useful 
instrument of power, and fostered until it grew into a monster far 
more fearful and degrading than the original from which it sprung, 

1* 



6 LORD LONDESBOROUGH. 

and infinitely more cruel in its influence. It is the object of the 
following detached histories to exhibit the character and forms 
under which, at various different periods, the superstitions of 
sorcery and magic aff"ected the progress, or interfered with the 
peace of society. At first they appeared as the mere, almost 
unobserved, fables of the vulgar — then they were seized upon as 
an arm of the ecclesiastical power, to crush those who dared to 
question the spiritual doctrines, or oppose the temporal power of 
the papal church. From this time sorcery makes its appearance 
more frequently in history, until it gained that hold on the minds 
of all classes which led to the fearful persecutions of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries. 

It is no part of the design of this volume to enter into a dis- 
quisition on what have been termed the occult sciences, nor do 
I pretend to give a regular history of witchcraft. I have merely 
attempted to show the influence which superstition once exer- 
cised on the history of the world, by a few narratives taken from 
the annals of past ages, of events which seemed to place it in 
its strongest and clearest light. For these sketches, thrown to- 
gether somewhat hastily, and gathered from a field of research 
which has always had great attractions for me, I venture to claim 
from your lordship an indulgence which will be the more valued 
from the appreciation which I know that these studies have 
aways received from you ; and I have only to hope for the same 
indulgence from the public at large. 

I have the honor to be, my lord, with sincere respect, 

Your lordship's very faithful servant, 

Thomas Wright. 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter I. — Introduction page 9 

Chapter IT. — Story of the Lady Alice Kyteler ... 23 
Chapter III. — Further Political Usage of the Belief in Sorcery. — 

The Templars 33 

Chapter IV. — Sorcery in France. — The Citizens of Arras . 47 
Chapter V. — The Lord of Mirebeau and Pierre d'Estaing the 

Alchemist 58 

Chapter VI. — The early Medieval Type of the Sorcerer ; Vir- 
gil the Enchanter 67 

Chapter VII. — The latter Medieval Types of the Magician ; 

Friar Bacon and Dr. Faustus . _. . - . . .80 
Chapter VIII. — Sorcery in Germany in the Fifteenth Century ; 

the Malleus Maleficarum 92 

Chapter IX. — Witchcraft in Scotland in the Sixteenth Century 103 
Chapter X. — King James and the Witches of Lothian . . 115 
Chapter XL — Magic in England during the Age of the Refor- 
mation . , . 126 

Chapter XII. — The English Magicians ; Dr. Dee and his Fol- 
lowers 143 

Chapter XIIL— The Witches of Warboys .... 159 
Chapter XIV.— The Poetry of Witchcraft . . . .173 
Chapter XV. — Witchcraft in France in the Sixteenth Century 185 
Chapter XVI. — Pierre d'Lancre and the Witches of Labourd 197 
Chapter XVII. — Magic in Spain ; the Auto-da-fe of Logrono 207 
Chapter XVIII. — Adventures of Doctor Torralva . . 216 
Chapter XIX. — Trial of the Earl and Countess of Somerset 224 
Chapter XX. — La Marechal d'Ancre ..... 241 - 
Chapter XXL — Louis Gaufridi 248 



8 CONTENTS. 

Chapter XXII. — The Ursulines of LouduQ . . . page 256 

Chapter XXIII. — The Lancashire Witches . . . 266 

Chapter XXIV. — Witchcraft in England during the earlier part 

of the Seventeenth Century . . . . . . 286 

Chapter XXV. — Witchcraft under the Commonwealth ; Mat- 
thew Hopkins the Witch-Finder 302 

Chapter XXVI. — Witchcraft in Germany in the earlier part of 

the Seventeenth Century 324 

Chapter XXVII. — The Witches of Scotland under King James 

after his Accession to the English Throne . . . 334 
Chapter XXVIII. — Confessions of Isobel Gowdie . . . 350 
Chapter XXIX. — The Witches of Mohra in Sweden . . 362 
Chapter XXX. — Sir Matthew Hale and Chief- Justice Holt . 372 
Chapter XXXI. — The Doings of Satan in New England , 385 
Chapter XXXII. — Conclusion . . ... . . 404 



SORCERY AID MAGIC. 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

If the universality of a belief be a proof of its truth, few 
creeds have been better established than that of sorcery. Every 
people, from the rudest to the most refined, we may almost add 
in every age, have believed in the kind of supernatural agency 
which we understand by this term. It was founded on the 
equally extensive creed, that, besides our own visible exis- 
tence, we live in an invisible world of spiritual beings, by which 
our actions and even our thoughts are often guided, and which 
have a certain degree of power over the elements and over the 
ordinary course of organic life. Many of these powerful beings 
were supposed to be enemies of mankind, fiendish creatures 
which thirsted after human blood, or demons whose constant 
business it was to tempt and seduce their victim, and deprive him 
of the hope of salvation. These beings were themselves sub- 
ject to certain mysterious influences, and became the slaves even 
of mortals, when by their profound penetration into the secrets 
of nature they obtained a knowledge of those influences. But 
more frequently their intercourse with man was voluntary, and 
the services they rendered him were only intended to draw him 
to a more certain destruction. It is a dark subject for investiga- 
tion ; and we will not pretend to decide whether, and how far, 
a higher Providence may, in some cases, have permitted such 
intercourse between the natural and supernatural world. Yet the 



]0 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

superstitions to which this creed gave rise have exerted a mighty 
inliiience on societj'^, through ages, which it is far from uninter- 
esting to trace in its outward manifestations. 

The belief of which we are treating manifested itself under 
two different forms, sorcery and magic. The magician differed 
from the witch, in this, that, while the latter was an ignorant in- 
strument in the hands of the demons, the former had become 
their master by the powerful intermediation of a science which 
was only within the reach of the few, and which these beings 
were unable to disobey. In the earlier ages, this mysterious sci- 
ence flourished widely, and there were noted schools of magic 
in several parts of Europe. One of the most famous was that 
of Toledo in Spain, nearly on the confines which divided Chris- 
tendom from Islam, on that spiritual neutral ground where the 
demon might then bid defiance to the gospel or the Koran. It 
was in this school that Gerbert, in the tenth century, is said to 
have obtained his marvellous proficiency in knowledge forbidden 
by the church. Gerbert lived at Toledo, in the house of a cel- 
ebrated Arabian philosopher, whose book of magic, or " grimoire," 
had Unusual power in coercing the evil one. Gerbert was seized 
with an ardent desire of possessing this book, but the Saracen 
would not part with it for love or money, and, lest it might be 
stolen from him, he concealed it under his pillow at night. The 
Saracen had a beautiful daughter ; and Gerbert, as the last re- 
source, gave his love to the maiden, and in a moment of amo- 
rous confidence learned from her where the book was concealed. 
He made the philosopher drunk, stole the grimoire, and took to 
flight. The magician followed him, and* was enabled, by con- 
sulting the stars, to know where he was, either on earth or wa- 
ter. But Gerbert at last baffled him, by hanging under a bridge 
in such a manner that he touched neither one element nor the 
other, and finally arrived in safety on the seashore. Here he 
opened his book, and by its powerful enchantment called up the 
arch fiend himself, who at his orders carried him in safety to the 
opposite coast. 

The science of the magician was dangerous, but not necessa- 
rily fatal, to his salvation. The possession of one object led nat- 
urally to the desire of another, until ambition, or avarice, or some 
other passion, tempted him at length to make the final sacrifice. 
Gerbert is said to have sold himself on condition of being made 
a pope. Magicians were, in general, beneficent, rather than 
noxious to their fellow-men ; it was only when provoked, that 
they injured or tormented them ; and their vengeance was in 



EUSTACE THE MONK— THEOPHILUS. 11 

most cases of a ludicrous character. A magician of the twelfth 
century, named Eustace the Monk, who also had studied in Tole- 
do, was ill-received in a tavern, in return for which he caused the 
hostess and her gossips to expose themselves in a disgraceful 
manner to the ridicule of their fellow-townspeople ; the latter 
had shown him disrespect, and he set them all by the ears with 
his conjurations ; a wagoner, in whose vehicle he was riding, 
treated him with insolence, and he terrified him with his enchant- 
ments. Another necromancer, according to a story of the thir- 
teenth century, went to a town to gain money by his feats ; the 
townspeople looked on, but gave him nothing ; and in revenge, 
by his magic [arte dcemonica), he made them all strip to the skin, 
and in this condition dance and sing about the streets. 

Sometimes the evil one had intercourse with men who were 
not magicians ; when they were influenced by some unattainable 
desire, he appeared to them, called or uncalled, and bought their 
souls in exchange for the gratification of their wishes. Not un- 
frequently the victim had fallen suddenly from wealth and pow- 
er, to extreme poverty and helplessness, and the tempter ap- 
peared to him when he had retired to some solitary spot to hide 
the poignancy of his grief. This circumstance was a fertile 
source of stories in the middle ages, and in most of which the 
victim of the fiend is rescued by the interference of the Virgin. 
Sometimes he sought an interview with the demon through the 
agency of a magician. Thus Theophilus, a personage who fig- 
ures rather extensively in medieval legends, was the seneschal 
of a bishop, and as such, a rich and powerful man ; but his pa- 
tron died, and the new bishop deprived him of his place and its 
emoluments. Theophilus, in his distress, consulted a Jew, who 
was a magician ; the latter called in the fiend, and Theophilus 
sold himself on condition of being restored to his old dignity, 
with increased power and authority. The temper of men raised 
in the world in this manner was generally changed, and they be- 
came vindictive, cruel, and vicious. It was one of the articles 
of the compact of Theophilus with the demon, that during the re- 
mainder of his life, he should practise every kind of vice and 
oppression ; but before his time came, he repented, and from a 
great sinner, became a great saint. We have in the legend of 
Faust (" Dr. Faustus"), the general type of a medieval magician. 

The witch held a lower degree in the scale of forbidden knowl- 
edge. She was a slave without recompense ; she had sold her- 
self without any apparent object, unless it were the mere power 
of doing evil. The witch remained always the same, poor and 



12 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

despised, an outcast from among her fellow-creatures. It is to 
this class of persons that our work will be more especially devo- 
ted ; and in the present chapter we will endeavor to trace, amid 
the dim light of early medieval history, the ideas of our fore- 
fathers on this subject, previous to the time when trials for sor- 
cery became frequent. 

It has been an article of popular belief, from the earliest pe- 
riod of the history of the nations of western Europe, that women 
were more easily brought into connection with the spiritual world 
than men : priestesses were the favorite agents of the deities of 
the ages of paganism, and the natural weakness and vengeful 
feelings of the sex made their power an object of fear. To them 
especially were known the herbs, or animals, or other articles 
which were noxious to mankind, and the cereaionies and charms 
whereby the influence of the gods might be obtained to preserve 
or to injure. After the introduction of Christianity, it was the de- 
mons who were supposed to listen to these incantations, and they 
are strictly forbidden in the early ecclesiastical laws, which alone 
appear at. first to have taken cognizance of them. We learn from 
these laws that witches were believed to destroy people's cattle 
and goods, to strike people with diseases, and even to cause their 
death. It does not appear, however, that previous to the twelfth 
century, at least, their power was believed to arise from any di- 
rect compact with the devil. In the adventures of Hereward, a 
witch is introduced to enchant a whole army, but she appears to 
derive her power from a spirit which presided over a fountain. 
The Anglo-Saxon women seem, from allusions met with here 
and there in old writers, to have been much addicted to these 
superstitious practices, but unfortunately we have very little in- 
formation as to their particular form or description. The char- 
acter of Hilda, in Bulwer's noble romance of " King Harold," is 
a faithful picture of the Saxon sorceress of a higher class. Du- 
ring the period subsequent to the Norman conquest, we are bet- 
ter acquainted with the general character of witchcraft in Eng- 
land, and among our neighbors on the continent, because more 
of the historical monuments of that period have been preserved. 

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the power of the 
witches to do mischief was derived from a direct compact with 
the demon, whom they were bound to worship with certain 
rites and ceremonies, the shadows of those which had in re- 
moter ages been performed in honor of the pagan gods. Sou- 
they's ballad has given a modern popularity to the story of the 
witch of Berkeley, which William of Malmsbury, an historian 



THE WITCH OF BERKELEY. 13 

of the first half of the twelfth century, relates from the informa- 
tion of one of his own acquaintances, who assured him that he 
was an eye-witness, and whom William " would have been 
ashamed to disbelieve."* No sooner had her imearthly master 
given the miserable woman warning that the hour had approached 
when he should take final possession, than she called to her 
death-bed her children and the monks of a neighboring monas- 
tery, confessed her evil courses and her subjection to the devil, 
and begged that they would at least secure her body from the 
hands of the fiends. " Sew me," she said, " in the hide of a stag, 
then place me in a stone cofiin, and fasten in the covering lead 
and iron. Upon this place another stone, and chain the whole 
down with three heavy chains of iron. Let fifty psalins be sung 
each night, and fifty masses be said by day, to break the power 
of the demons. If you can thus keep my body three nights, on 
the fourth day you may securely bury it in the ground." These 
directions were executed to the letter ; but psalms and masses 
were equally unavailable. The first night the priests withstood 
the eff'orts of the fiends ; the second they became more clamo- 
rous, the gates of the monastery were burst open in spite of the 
strength of the bolts, and two of the chains which held down the 
coffin were broken, though the middle one held firm. On- the 
third night the clamor of the fiends increased till the monastery 
trembled from its foundations ; and the priests, stiff with terror, 
were unable to proceed with their service. The doors at length 
burst open of their own accord, and a demon larger and more 
terrible than any of the others, stalked into the church. He 
stopped at the coffin, and with a fearful voice ordered the woman 
to arise. She answered that she was held down by the chain ; 
the demon put his foot to the coffin, the last chain broke asunder 
like a bit of thread, and the covering of the cotfin flew off". The 
body of the witch then arose, and her persecutor took her by the 
hand, and led her to the door, where a black horse of gigantic 
stature, its back covered with iron spikes, awaited them, and, 
seating her beside him on its back, he disappeared from the sight 
of the terrified monks. But the horrible screams of his victim 
were heard through the country for miles as they passed along. 

At this period the witches met together by night, in solitary 
places, to worship their master, who appeared to them in 
the shape of a cat, or a goat, or sometimes in that of a man. 
At these meetings, as we are informed by John of Salisbury ,'( 
they had feasts and some were appointed to serve at table, while 
* Ego illud a tali audivi, qui se vidisse juraret, cui erubescerem non credere. 

2 



14 SORCEKY AND MAGIC. 

others received punishment or reward, according to their zeal in 
the service of the evil one. Hither, also, they brought children 
which they had stolen from their cradles, and which were some- 
times torn to pieces -and devoured. We see here the first out- 
lines of the witches' " sabbath" of a later age. The witches came 
to these assemblies riding through the air, mounted on besoms. 
William of Auverne, who wrote in the thirteenth century, in- 
forms us that when the witches wished to go to the place of ren- 
dezvous, they took a reed or cane, and, on making some magi- 
cal signs and uttering certain barbarous words, it became trans- 
formed into a horse, which carried them thither with extraordi- 
nary rapidity. It was a very common article of belief in the 
middle ages, that women of this class rode about through the air 
at night, mounted on strange beasts ; that they passed over im- 
mense distances in an incredible short space of time ; and that 
they entered men's houses without opening doors or windows, 
and destroyed their goods, and injured their persons while asleep, 
sometimes even causing their death. Vincent of Beauvais, in 
the thirteenth century, tells a story of one of these wandering 
dames, who one day went to the priest in the church, and said, 
" Sir, I did you a great service last night, and saved you from 
much evil ; for the dames with whom I am accustomed to go 
about at night, entered your chamber, and if I had not interceded 
with them, and prayed for you, they would have done you an in- 
jury." Says the priest, " The door of my chamber was locked 
and bolted ; how could you enter it ?" To wiiich the old woman 
(for we are assured that it was an old woman), answered, " Sir, 
neither door nor lock can restrain or hinder us from freely going 
in and out wherever we choose." Then the priest shut and 
bolted the church-doors, and seizing the staff of the cross, " I 
will prove if it be true," said he, " that I may repay you for so 
great a service," and he belabored the woman's back and shoul- 
ders. To all her outcries, his only reply was, " Get out of the 
church and fly, since neither door nor lock can restrain you ?" 
It was an argument that could not be evaded. A writer of the 
twelfth century, however, relates from his otvn knowledge, an in- 
cident where a woman in France had been seized for her wicked 
opinions, and condemned to the fire ; but, with a word or two of 
contempt for her keepers and judges, she approached the win- 
dow of the room in which she was confined, uttered a charm, and 
instantly disappeared in the air. 

Another faculty possessed by the witches of the twelfth and thir- 
teenth centuries, was that of taking strange shapes, as those of dif- 



THE METAMORPHOSIS. 15 

ferent animals, or of transforming others. It was a very preva- 
lent belief that such persons turned themselves into ravenous 
wolves, and wandered about by night to devour people. They took 
many other shapes to indulge passions v/hich could not be other- 
wise gratified. They sometimes revenged themselves upon their 
enemies, or those against whom they bore ill-will, by turning 
them into dogs or asses, and they could only recover their shapes 
by bathing in running water. William of Malmsbury, in the ear- 
lier part of the twelfth century, tells us, that in the high road to 
Rome there dwelt two old women, of no good reputation, in a 
wretched hut, where they allured Aveary travellers ; and by their 
charms they transformed them into horses, or swine, or any other 
animals which they could sell to the merchants who passed that 
way, by which means they gained a livelihood. One day a joug- 
leur, or mountebank, asked for a night's lodging ; and when they 
were informed of his profession, they told him that they had an 
ass which was remarkable for its intelligence — being deficient 
only in speech, but which would do every kind of feat it was or- 
dered to do. The jougleur saw the ass, was delighted with its 
exploits, and bought it for a considerable sum of money. The 
woman told him at parting, that if he would preserve the animal 
long, he must carefully keep it from water. The mountebank 
followed these directions, and his ass became a very fertile source 
of profit. But its kpeper, with increase of riches, became more 
dissolute, and less attentive to his interests ; and one day while 
he was in a state of drunken forgetfulness, the ass escaped, and 
ran directly to the nearest stream, into which it had no sooner 
thrown itself, than it recovered its original shape of a handsome 
young man. The mountebank soon afterward missing his ass, 
set out anxiously in search of it, and met the young man, who 
told him what had happened, and how he had been transformed 
by the wicked charms of the old women. The latter were car- 
ried with him before the pope, to whom they confessed their evil 
practices. 

The power of the witches was indeed very great ; and as they 
were believed to be entirely occupied in the perpetration of mis- 
chief, it was in these early ages an object of universal terror. 
They sent storms which destroyed the crops, and overthrew or 
set fire to people's houses. They sunk ships on the sea. They 
cast charms on people's cattle. They carried away children 
from the cradle, and often tore and devoured them at their horri- 
ble orgies, while sometimes they left changelings in their places. 
They struck men and women, with noxious diseases, and made 



16 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

them gradually pine away. The earlier German and Anglo-Saxon 
witches were still more ferocious, for it appears that when they 
found men asleep, or off their guard, they slew them, and de- 
voured their heart and breast, a crime for which a severe punish- 
ment is allotted in the ancient laws of some of the Teutonic 
tribes. But it appears, by some of these laws, that the witches 
had contrived a singular mode of evasion. When they found a 
man asleep, they tore out his heart and devoured it, and then 
filled the cavity with straw, or a piece of wood, or some other 
substance, and by their charms gave him an artificial life, so that 
he appeared to live and move in the world, and execute all his 
functions, until long after the actual crime had taken place, and 
then he pined away, and seemed to die. 

The practice of bewitching and killing people by charmed im- 
ages of wax, which is so often mentioned in later times, does not 
occur in the earlier history of sorcery in the west. It is not dis- 
tinctly mentioned until the beginning of the fourteenth century ; 
but it must not be forgotten that we have no detailed trials of 
witches in these early ages, and that consequently we find only 
accidental allusions to their practices. The earliest trial for 
witchcraft in England occurs in the tenth year of the reign of 
King John, when, as it is briefly stated in the ^^ Ahbreviatio Pla- 
citorum" the only record of the legal proceedings of the time, 
" Agnes, the wife of Odo the merchant, accused Gideon of sor- 
cery (dc sorceriaj^ and she was acquitted by the judgment of 
[hot] iron." During the reign of Edward II., in 1324, occurs 
the earliest case of sorcery in England of which we have any 
details. The actors in it were men, and their object was to 
cause the death of the king, the two Despensers (his favorites), 
and the prior of Coventry, who, it appears, had been supported 
by the royal favorites in oppressing the city of Coventry, and 
more especially certain of its citizens. The latter went to a fa- 
mous necromancer of Coventry, named Master John of Notting- 
ham, and his man Robert Marshall of Leicester, and requested 
them to aid " by their necromancy and their arts" in bringing 
about the death of the king, the two favorites, and the said prior. 
Robert Marshall, perhaps in consequence of a quarrel with his 
master, sought his revenge by laying an information against the 
other confederates. He said that John of Nottingham and him- 
self having agreed for a certain sum of money to do as they were 
requested by the citizens, the latter brought them, on the Sunday 
next after the feast of St. Nicholas, being the 11th of March, a 
sum of money in part payment, with seven pounds of wax and 



THE MAGICIANS OF COVENTRY. 17 

two yards of canvass, with which wax the necromancer and his 
man made seven images, the one representing the king with his 
crown on his head, the six others representing the two Despen- 
sers, the prior, his caterer and steward, and a certain person 
named Richard de Lowe, the latter being chosen merely for the 
purpose of trying an experiment upon him to prove the strength 
of the charm. Robert Marshall confessed that he and his mas- 
ter, John of Nottingham, went to an old ruined house under 
Shortely park, about half a league from the city of Coventry, in 
:which they began their work on the Monday after the feast of St. 
Nicholas, and that they remained constantly at work until the 
Saturday after the feast of the Ascension ; that " as the said Mas- 
ter John and he were at their work in the said old house the 
Friday after the feast of the Holy Cross, about midnight, the said 
Master John gave to the said Robert a broach of lead with a sharp 
point, and commanded him to push it to the depth of about two 
inches in the forehead of the image made after Richard de Lowe, 
by which he would prove the others ; and so he did ; and the next 
mornmg the said Master John sent the said Robert to the house of 
the said Richard de Lowe, to spy in what condition he was, and the 
said Robert found the said Richard screaming and crying ' Har- 
row!' and without knowledge of anybody, having lost his mem- 
ory ; and so the said Richard lay languishing until the daybreak 
of the Sunday before the feast of the Ascension, at which hour 
the said Master John drew out the said leaden broach from the 
forehead of the said image made after the said Richard, and thrust 
it into its heart. And thus the said broach remained in the heart 
of the image until the Wednesday following, on which day the 
said Richard died." It appears that a stop was put to the fur- 
ther prosecution of their design, and thus the only person who 
suffered was one against whom they appear to have had no cause 
for malice. The trial was adjourned from term to term, until at 
length it disappears from the rolls, and the prosecution was prob- 
ably dropped. 

It was, however, the church more frequently than the common 
law, which took cognizance of such crimes ; for sorcery was con- 
ceived to be one of the means used by Satan to stir up heresies, 
and it was on this account that on the continent it was at an 
early period treated with so much severity.* Apostate priests 
were believed to attend the secret assemblies of the witches, and 

* The earliest instance which I have met with of the burning of witches, occurs^ 
in the curious treatise of Walter Mapes, " De Nugis Curialiuiii," dist. iv., chap. 6, 
written in the reign of our Henry II. 

2* 



18 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

receive their lessons from the evil one. A very remarkable heretical 
sorcerer, named Eiido de Stella, lived in the middle of the twelfth 
century, and is the subject of several wonderful stories in the 
chronicles of those times. By his " diabolical charms," if vi^e 
believe William of Newbury, he collected together a great mul- 
titude of followers. Sometimes they were carried about from 
province to province, vi^ith amazing rapidity, making converts 
wherever they stopped. At other times they retired into desert 
places, where their leader held his court with great apparent 
magnificence, and noble tables were suddenly spread with rich 
viands and strong wines, served by invisible spirits, and whatever 
the guests wished for was laid before them in an instant. But 
William of Newbury tells us that he had heard, from some of 
Eudo's followers, that these various meats were not substantial, 
that they gave satisfaction only for the moment, which was soon 
followed by keener hunger than before, so that they were contin- 
ually eating. Any one, however, who once tasted of these meats, 
or received any of Eudo's gifts, was immediately held by a charm, 
and became involuntarily one of his followers. A knight of his 
acquaintance — for he was a man of good family — visited him at 
his " fantastic" court, and endeavored in vain to convert him from 
his evil ways. When he departed, Eudo presented his esquire 
with a handsome hawk. The knight, observing his esquire with 
the bird on his hand, advised him to cast it away ; but he refused, 
and they had scarcely left the assembly which surrounded Eudo's 
resting-place, when the esquire felt the claws of his bird grasp- 
ing him tighter and tighter, until, before he could disengage him- 
self, it flew away with him, and he was seen no more. The 
hawk was a demon. Eudo was at length arrested by the arch- 
bishop of Rheims, and died in prison. His followers dispersed 
when their leader was taken, but some of them were seized and 
burnt. 

The religious sects which sprang up rather numerously in the 
twelfth century, in consequence of the violent intellectual agita- 
tion of that age, and which attempted to throw off the corruptions 
of the papacy, naturally gave great alarm to the church ; and the 
advocates of the latter adopted the course, too common in reli- 
gious controversies, of attempting to render their opponents, un- 
popular, by fixing upon them some disgraceful stigma. They 
thus ascribed to them most of the scandalous practices which the 
fathers had told them were in use among the Manichaeans and 
other heretics of the primitive church, while among the vulgar 
they identified them with the hated sorcerer and witch, and ac- 



SORCERY AND HERESY. 19 

cused them of being in direct compact witli the deviU The 
secrecy which their safety compelled them to observe gave a 
ready handle for such sinister reports. William of Rheims, the 
prelate mentioned above, appears to have been a great persecutor 
of these sects, which were numerous in all parts of France, and 
were known by such names as Publicans (said to be a corruption 
of Paulicians), Paternins, &c., in the north, and Waldensesin 
the south. \V alter Mapes, a well-known English writer of the 
latter half of the twelfth century, in a treatise entitled "De Nugis 
Curialium,^'' recently published for the first time by the author of 
these pages, has preserved some curious stories relating to these 
Publicans, whom he represents as being under the necessity of 
concealing their opinions from the knowledge of the public. Some 
of them, he says, who had returned to the community of the church, 
confessed that at their meetings, which were held " about the 
first watch of the night," they closed the doors and windows, and 
sat waiting in silence, until at length a black cat descended among 
them. They then immediately put out the lights, and, approach- 
ing this strange object of adoration, every one caught hold of it 
how he could and kissed it. The worshippers then took hold 
of each other, men and women, and proceeded to acts which can 
not here be described. The archbishop of Rheims told Mapes 
himself that there was a certain great baron in the district of 
Vienne who always carried with him in his scrip a small quan- 
tity of exorcised salt, as a defence against the sorcery of these 
people, to which he thought he was exposed even at table. In- 
formation was brought to him at last that his nephew, who was 
also a man of great wealth and influence (perhaps the same Eudo 
de Stella mentioned by William of Newbury), had been converted 
to the creed of these Publicans or Paternins by the intermedia- 
tion of two knights, and he immediately paid him a visit. As 
they all sat at dinner, the noble convert ordered to be placed be- 
fore his uncle a fine barbel on a dish, which was equally tempt- 
ing by its look and smell ; but he had no sooner sprinkled a little 
of his salt upon it, than it vanished, and nothing was left on the 
dish but a bit of dirt. The uncle, astonished at what had hap- 
pened, urged his nephew to abandon his evil courses, but in vain, 
and he left him, carrying away as prisoners the two knights who 
had corrupted him. To punish these for their heresy, he bound 
them in a little hut of inflammable materials, to which he set fire 
in order to burn them ; but when the ashes were cleared away, 
they were found totally unhurt. To counteract the effects this 
false miracle might produce on the minds of the vulgar, the baron 



20 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

now erected a larger hut with still more inflammable materials, 
which he sprinkled all over with holy water as a precaution 
against sorcery ; but now it was found that the flames would not 
communicate themselves to the building. When people entered, 
however, they found to their astonishment that the former miracle 
was reversed : for now, while the wooden building Avhich had 
been sprinkled with holy water would not burn, 'the two sorcerers 
were found reduced to ashes. The truth of this story was as- 
serted by the prince-bishop of Rheims (for the prelate was the 
French king's brother-in-law), and the readiness with which it 
was received is a proof of the extraordinary credulity of the age 
in matters of this kind. Walter Mapes, who was rather beyond 
his age in liberality of sentiment, acknowledges the simplicity 
and innocence of the Waldenses, or Vaudois ; yet, before much 
more than a century Avas past, they also were exposed to the 
worst part of the charges mentioned above. A list of the pre- 
tended errors of this sect, compiled probably about the end of the 
thirteenth century, speaks of the same disgraceful proceedings at 
their secret meetings ; of the figure of a cat under which the de- 
mon appeared to them, to receive their homage ; and tells us that 
they travelled through the air or skies anointed with a certain 
ointment : but the writer confesses naively that they had not 
done such things to his knowledge m the parts where he lived.* 
The demons whom the sorcerer served seem rarely to have 
given any assistance to their victims, when the latter fell into the 
hands of the judicial authorities. But if they escaped punish- 
ment by the agency of the law, they were only reserved for a 
more terrible end. We have already seen the fate of the woman 
of Berkeley. A writer of the thirteenth century has preserved 
a story of a man who, by his compact with the evil one, had col- 
lected together great riches. One day, while he was absent in 
the fields, a stranger of suspicious appearance came to his house, 
•and asked for him. His wife replied that he was not at home. 
■The stranger said, " Tell him, when he returns, that to-night he 
must pay me my debt." The wife replied that she was not aware 

" This list of the errors of the Waldenses is printed in the "Reliqiuae Antiquae," 
vol. i., p. 246. The charges alluded to are placed at the end. 

" Item, habent etiam inter se mixtum abonainabile et perversa dogmata ad hoc 
apta, sed non repetihir quod abutantur in partibus istis a multis temponb^is. 

" Item, in aliqioiMis aliis partibus apparet eis dasmon sub specie et figxu-a cati, 
quern sub cauda sigilJatim osculautur. 

" Item, in aliis partibus super unum baculum certo unguento perunctum equitant 
et ad loca assignata ubi voluerint congregantjur in momento dum volunt. Sed ista 
in istis partibus non inveniuntur." 

The latter is distinctly an allusioa to the "sabbath" of the witches. 



EUDO AND THE DEMON OLGA. 21 

he owed anything to him. " Tell him," said the stranger, with 
a ferocious look, " that I will have my debt to-night !" The hus- 
band returned, and, when informed of Avhat had taken place, 
merely remarked that the demand was just. He then ordered 
his bed to be made that night in an outhouse, where he had never 
slept before, and he shut himself in it with a lighted candle. 
The family were astonished, and could not resist the impulse to 
gratify their curiosity by looking through the holes in the door. 
They beheld the same stranger, who had entered without open- 
ing the door, seated beside his victim, and they appeared to be 
counting large sums of money. Soon they began to quarrel about 
their accounts, and were proceeding from threats to blows, when 
the servants, who were looking through the door, burst it open, 
that they might help their master. The light was instantly ex- 
tinguished, and when another was brought, no traces could be 
found of either of the disputants, nor were they ever afterward 
heard of. The suspicious-looking stranger was the demon him- 
self, who had carried away his victim. 

In some cases the demon interfered uncalled for, and without 
any apparent advantage to himself. A story told by Walter 
Mapes furnishes a curious illustration of this, while it shows us 
the strong tendency of the popular mind to believe in supernatu- 
ral agency. The wars and troubles of the twelfth century, joined 
with the defective construction of the social system, exposed 
France and other countries to the ravages of troops of soldier- 
robbers, who made war on society for their own gain, and who 
represented in a rude form the Free Companies of a later pei'iod. 
They were commonly known by the appellation of Rentiers, and 
in many instances had for their leaders knights and gentlemen 
who, having squandered away their property, or incurred the ban 
of society, betook themselves to this wild mode of life. The 
chief of one of the bands which ravaged the diocese of Beauvais 
in the twelfth century was named Eudo. He was the son and 
heir of a baron of great wealth, but had wasted his patrimony un- 
til he was reduced to beggary. One day he wandered from the 
city into a neighboring wood, and there he sank down on a bank- 
side, reflecting on his own miserable condition. Suddenly he 
was roused from his revery by the appearance of a stranger, a 
man of large stature but repulsive countenance, who nevertheless 
addressed him in conciliatory language, and soon showed that he 
knew all his affairs. The stranger, who was no other than a^ 
demon in disguise, promised Eudo that he should not only re- 
cover his former riches, but that he should gain infinitely more 



22 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

wealth and power than he had ever possessed before, if he would 
submit to his guidance and follow his councils. After much 
hesitation, Eudo accepted the tempter's aid ; and the laWer not 
only waived any disagreeable conditions on the part of his victim, 
but even agreed that he would give him three successive warn- 
ings before his death, so that he might have sufficient time for 
repentance. 

From this moment Olga, for this was the name the demon 
took, was Eudo's constant companion, and the adviser of all his 
actions. They soon raised a powerful troop, and, by the knowl- 
edge and skill of Olga, the Avhole district of Beauvais was grad- 
ually overrun and plundered, and its inhabitants exposed to every 
outrage in which the lawless soldiers of the middle ages indulged. 
Success attended all Eudo's undertakings, and neither towns nor 
castles were safe from their ravages. The possessions of the 
clergy were the special objects of Eudo's fury ; and the bishop 
of Beauvais, after using in vain all means of reclaiming or resist- 
ing him, thundered against him the deepest anathema of the 
church. In the midst of these daily scenes of rapine and slaugh- 
ter, one day Olga met him with a more serious countenance than 
usual, reminded him of his sins, preached repentance, and rec- 
ommended him, above all things, to submit to the bishop and rec- 
oncile himself to the church. Eudo obeyed, obtained the bishop's 
absolution, led a better life for a short time, and then returned to 
his old ways, and became worse than before. In the course of 
one of his plundering expeditions, he was thrown from his horse, 
and broke his leg. This Eudo took as his first warning ; he 
repented anew, went to the bishop and made his confession (omit- 
ting, however, all mention of his compact v/ith Olga), and re- 
mained peaceful till his recovery from the accident, when he col- 
lected his followers again, and pursued his old hfe with such 
eagerness, that no one could speak of his name without horror. 
A second warning, the loss of his eye by an arrow, had the same 
result. At length he was visited by the third and last warning, 
the death of his only son, and then true penitence visited his 
heart. He hastened to the city of Beauvais, and found the bishop 
outside the walls assisting at the burning of a witch. But the 
prelate had now experienced so many times the falseness of 
Eudo's penitence, that he refused to believe it when true. The 
earnest supplications of the sinner, even the tardy sympathy of 
the muhitude who stood round, most of whom had been sufferers 
from his violence, were of no avail, and the bishop persisted in 
refusing to the unhappy man the consolations of the church. At 



THE LADY ALICE KYTELER. 23 

length, tormented and angered with his importunities, the bishop 
exclaimed, " If I must relent, be it knov/n that I enjoin as thy 
penitence that thou throw thyself into this fire which has beer- 
prepared for the sorceress." Eudo remonstrated not, but threw 
himself into the fire, and was consumed to ashes. 

With the fourteenth century we enter upon a new period of 
the history of sorcery. The trial of the necromancers of Coven- 
try appears to have originated in an attempt to gratify private 
revenge. In our next chapter we shall detail a far more extraor- 
dinary case, occurring at the same time, which appears to have 
arisen from acts of extortion and oppression. From this time, 
during at least two centuries (the fourteenth and fifteenth), we 
shall find sorcery used frequently as a powerful instrument of 
political intrigue. After that period, we enter upon what may 
be termed, par excelleiice, the age of witches. 



CHAPTER II. 

STORY OF THE LADY ALICE KYTELER. 

It was late in the twelfth century when the Anglo-Normans 
first set their feet in Ireland as conquerors, and before the end 
of the thirteenth the portion of that island which has since re- 
ceived the name of the English Pale, was already covered with 
flourishing towns and cities, which bore witness to the rapid 
increase of commerce in the hands of the enterprising and in- 
dustrious settlers from the shores of Great Britain. The county 
of Kilkenny, attractive by its beauty and by its various resources, 
was one of the districts first occupied by the invaders ; and at 
the time of which we are speaking, its chief town, named also 
Kilkenny, was a strong city with a commanding castle, and was 
inhabited by wealthy merchants, one of whom was a rich banker 
and money-lender named William Outlawe. 

This William Outlawe married a lady of property named Alice 
Kyteler, or Le Kyteler, who was, perhaps, the sister or a near rela- 
tive of a William Kyteler, incidentally mentioned as holding the 
office of sheriff" of the liberty of Kilkenny. William Outlawe died 
some time before 1 302 ; and his widow became the wife of Adam le 
Blond, of Callan, of a family which, by its English name of White, 
held considerable estates in Kilkenny and Tipperary in later 
times. This second husband was dead before liill ; for in that 



24 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

year the lady Alice appears as the wife of Richard de Valle : and 
at the time of the events narrated in the following pages, she was 
the spouse of a fourth husband, Sir John le Poer. By her first 
husband she had a son, named also William Outlawe, who ap- 
pears to have been the heir to his father's property, and suc- 
ceeded him as a banker. He was his mother's favorite child, 
and seems to have inherited also a good portion of the wealth of 
the lady Alice's second and third husbands. 

The few incidents relating to this family previous to the year 
1324, which can be gathered from the entries on the Irish rec- 
ords, seem to show that it was not altogether free from the turbu- 
lent spirit which was so prevalent among the Anglo-Irish in for- 
mer ages. It appears that, in 1302, Adam le Blond and Alice 
his wife intrusted to the keeping of William Outlawe the younger 
the sum of three thousand pounds in money, which William Out- 
lawe, for the better security, buried in the earth within his house, 
a method of concealing treasure which accounts for many of our 
antiquarian discoveries. This was soon noised abroad ; and one 
night William le Kyteler, the sheriff above mentioned, with oth- 
ers, by precept of the seneschal of the liberty of Kilkenny, broke 
into the house vi et armis, as the record has it, dug up the money, 
and carried it off, along with a hundred pounds belonging to 
William Outlawe himself, which they found in the house. Such 
an outrage as this could not pass in silence ; but the perpetrators 
attempted to shelter themselves under the excuse that, being dug 
up from the ground, it was treasure-trove, and as such belonged 
to the king ; and, when Adam le Blond and his wife Alice at- 
tempted to make good their claims, the sheriff trumped up a 
charge against them that they had committed homicide and other 
crimes, and that they had concealed Roesia Outlawe (perhaps 
the sister of William Outlawe the younger), accused of theft, 
from the agents of justice, under which pretences he threw into 
prison all three, Adam, Alice, and Roesia. They were, how- 
ever, soon afterward liberated, but we do not learn if they recov- 
ered their money. William Outlawe's riches, and his mother's 
partiality for him, appear to have drawn upon them both the jeal- 
ousy and hatred of many of their neighbors, and even of some of 
their kindred, but they were too powerful and too highly con- 
nected to be reached in any ordinary way. 

At this time Richard de Ledrede, a turbulent intriguing ]?rel- 
ate, held the see of Ossory, to which he had been consecrated 
in 1318 by mandate from Pope John XXII., the same pontiff to 
whom we owe the first bull against sorcery (contra magos ma- 



THE LADY ALICE KYTELEJl. 25 

gicasque superstitionesj, which was the groundwork of the in- 
quisitorial persecutions of the following ages. In 1324, Bishop 
Richard made a visitation of his diocese, and " found," as the 
chi'onicler of these events informs us, " by an inquest in which 
were five knights and other noblemen in great multitude, that in 
the city of Kilkenny there had long been, and still were, many 
sorcerers using divers kinds of witchcraft, to the investigation of 
which the bishop proceeding, as he was obliged by duty of his 
office, found a certain rich lady, called the lady Alice Kyteler, the 
mother of William Outlawe, with many of her accomplices, in- 
volved in various such heresies." Here, then, was a fair occa- 
sion for displaying the zeal of a follower of the sorcery-hating. 
Pope John, and also perhaps for indulging some other passions. 
The persons accused as Lady Alice's accomplices, were her 
son, the banker, William Outlawe, a clerk named Robert de 
Bristol, John Galrussyn, William Payn of Boly, Petronilla de 
Meath, Petronilla's daughter Sarah, Alice, the wife of Henry the 
Smith, Annota Lange, Helena Galrussyn, Sysok Galrussyn, and 
Eva de Brounstoun. The charges brought against them were 
^distributed under seven formidable heads. First, it was asserted 
that, in order to give effect to their sorcery, they were in the 
habit of totally denying the faith of Christ and of the church for 
a year or month, according as the object to be attained was greater 
or less, so that during the stipulated period they believed in noth- 
ing that the church believed, and abstained from worshipping the 
body of Christ, from entering a church, from hearing mass, and 
from participating in the sacrament. Second, that they propiti- 
ated the demons with sacrifices of living_ animals, which they 
divided member from member, and offered, by scattering them in 
cross-roads, to a certain demon who caused himself to be called 
Robin Artisson ffMus Artis), who was " one of the poorer class 
of hell." Third, that by their sorceries they sought council and 
answers from demons. Fourth, that they used the ceremonies of 
the church in their nightly conventicles, pronouncing, with lighted 
candles of wax, sentence of excommunication, even against the 
persons of their own husbands, naming expressly every member, 
from the sole of the foot to the top of the head, and at length ex- 
tinguishing the candles with the exclamation " Fi ! fi ! fi ! Amen." 
Fifth, that with the intestines and other inner parts of cocks sac- 
rificed to the demons, with " certain horrible worms," various 
herbs, the nails of dead men, the hair, brains, and clothes of 
children which had died unbaptized, and other things equally 
disgusting, boiled in the skull of a certain robber who had been 

3 



26 - SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

beheaded, on a fire made of oak-sticks, they had made powders 
and ointments, and also candles of fat boiled in the said skull, 
with certain charms, which things were to be instrumental m ex- 
citing love or hatred, and in killing and otherwise afflicting the 
bodies of feithful Christians, and in effecting various other pur- 
poses. Sixth, that the sons and daughters of the four husbands 
of the lady Alice Kyteler had made their complaint to the bishop, 
that she, by such sorcery, had procured the death of her hus- 
bands, and had so infatuated and charmed them, that they had 
aiven all their property to her and her son, to the perpetual impov- 
erishment of their sons and heirs ; insomuch, that her present 
husband. Sir John le Poer, was reduced to a most miserable 
state of body by her powders, ointments, and other magical oper- 
ations ; but being warned by her maid-servant, he had forcibly 
taken from his wife the keys of her boxes, m which he found 
a bag filled with the " detestable" articles above enumerated, 
which he had sent to the bishop. Seventh, that there was an 
unholy connection between the said Lady Alice and the demon 
called Robin Artisson, who sometimes appeared to herintiie 
form of a cat, sometimes in that of a black shaggy dog, and at, 
others in the form of a black man, with two tall and equally- 
swarthy companions, each carrying an iron rod m his hand. It 
is added by some of the old chroniclers, that her offermg to the 
demon was nine red cocks, and nine peacocks' eyes, at a certain 
stone bridge at a cross-road ; that she had a certain ointment 
with which she rubbed a beam of wood " called a cowltre, upon 
which she and her accomplices were carried to any part ot the 
world they wished, without hurt or stoppage; that "she swept 
the stretes of Kilkennie betweene compleme and twilight, raking 
all the filth towards the doores of hir sonne William Outlawe, 
murmuring secretlie with hir selfe these words : 

' To the house of William my soniie, 
Hie all the wealth of Kilkennie town;' " 

and that in her house was seized a wafer of consecrated bread, 
on which the name of the devil was Avritten. 

The bishop of Ossory resolved at once to enforce m its utmost 
rigor the recent papal bull against offenders of this class ; but he 
had to contend with greater difficulties than he expected. J he 
mode of proceeding was new, for hitherto in England sorcery 
was looked upon as a crime of which the secular law had cog- 
nizance, and not as belonging to the ecclesiastical court ; and 
this is said to have been the first trial of the kind m Ireland that 



THE LADY ALICE KYTELER, 27 

had attracted any public attention. Moreover, the lady Alice, 
who was the person chiefly attacked, had rich and powerM sup- 
porters. The first step taken by the bishop was to require the 
chancellor to issue a writ for the arrest of the persons accused. 
But it happened that the lord-chancellor of Ireland at this time 
was Roger Outlawe, prior of the order of St. John of Jerusalem, 
and a kinsman of William Outlawe. This dignitary, in conjunc- 
tion with Arnald le Poer, seneschal of Kilkenny, expostulated 
with the bishop, and tried to persuade him to drop the suit. 
When, however, the latter refused to listen to them, and persist- 
ed in demanding the writ, the chancellor informed him that it 
was not customary to issue a writ of this kind, until the parties 
had been regularly proceeded against according to law. The 
bishop indignantly replied that the service of the church was 
above the forms of the law of the land ; but the chancellor now 
turned a deaf ear, and the bishop sent two apparitors with a for- 
mal attendance of priests to the house of William Outlawe, where 
Lady Alice was residing, to cite her in person before his court. 
The lady refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the eccle- 
siastical court in this case ; and, on the day she was to appear, 
the chancellor, Roger Outlawe, sent advocates, who publicly 
pleaded her right to defend herself by her counsel, and not to 
appear in person. The bishop, regardless of this plea, pro- 
nounced against her the sentence of excommunication, and cited 
her son, William Outlawe, to appear on a certain day, and an- 
swer to the charge of harboring and concealing his mother in 
defiance of the authority of the church. 

On learning this, the seneschal of Kilkenny, Arnald le Poer, 
repaired to the priory of Kells, where the bishop was lodged, 
and made a long and touching appeal to him to mitigate his an- 
ger, until at length, wearied and provoked by his obstinacy, he 
left his presence with threats of vengeance. The next morning, 
as the bishop was departing from the priory to continue his visi- 
tation in other parts of the diocese, he was stopped at the en- 
trance to the town of Kells by one of the seneschal's officers, 
Stephen le Poer, with a body of armed men, who conducted him 
as a prisoner to the castle of Kilkenny, where he was kept in 
custody until the day was past on which William Outlawe had 
been cited to appear in his court. The bishop, after many pro- 
tests on the indignity offered in his person to the church, and on 
the protection given to sorcerers and heretics, was obliged to 
submit. It Avas a mode of evading the form of law, characteris,- 
tic of an age in which the latter was subservient to force, and the 



28 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

bishop's friends believed that the king's officers were bribed by 
William Outlawe's wealth. They even reported afterward, to 
throw more discredit on the authors of this act of violence, that 
one of the guards was hef\rd to say to ariother, as they led him to 
prison, " That fair steed which William Outlawe presented to 
our lord Sir Arnald last night draws well, for it has drawn the 
bishop to prison." 

This summary mode of proceeding against an ecclesiastic, 
appears to have caused astonishment even in Ireland, and during 
the first day multitudes of people of all classes visited the bishop 
in his confinement, to feed and comfort him, the general ferment 
increasing with the discourses he pronounced to his visiters. 
To hinder this, the seneschal ordered him to be more strictlj'- con- 
fined, and forbade the admission of any visiters, except a few of 
the bishop's especial friends and servants. The bishop at once 
placed the whole dioces_e under an interdict. It was necessary 
to prepare immediately some excuse for these proceedings, and 
the seneschal issued a proclamation calling upon all who had 
any complaints to make against the bishop of Ossory to come 
forward ; and at an inquest held before the justices itinerant, 
many grievous crimes of the bishop were rehearsed, but none 
would venture personally to charge him with them. All these 
circumstances, ho^vever, show that the bishop was not faultless ; 
and that his conduct would not bear a very close examination, is 
evident from the fact, that on more than one occasion in subse- 
quent times, he was obliged to shelter himself under the protec- 
tion of the king's pardon for all past offences. William Outlawe 
now went to the archives of Kilkenny, and there found a former 
deed of accusation against the bishop of Ossory for having de- 
frauded a widow of the inheritance of her husband. The bishop's 
party said that it was a cancelled document, the case having 
been taken out of the secular court ; and that William had had 
a new copy made of it to conceal the evidence of this fact, and 
had then rubbed the fresh parchment with his shoes in order to 
give his copy the appearance of an old document. However, it 
was delivered to the seneschal, who now offered to release his pris- 
oner on condition of his giving sufficient bail to appear and an- 
swer in the secular court the charge thus brought against him. 
This the bishop refused to do, and after he had remained eigh- 
teen days in confinement, he was unconditionally set free. 

The bishop marched from his prison in triumph, full-dressed 
in his pontifical robes, and immediately cited William Outlawe 
to appear before him in his court on another day ; but before that 



THE LADY ALICE KYTELER. 29 

day arriA^ed, lie receii^ed a royal writ, ordering him to appear be- 
fore the lord-justice of Ireland without any delay, on penalty of a 
fine of a thousand pounds, to answer to the king for having placed 
his diocese under interdict, and also to make his defence against 
the accusations of Arnald le Poer. He received a similar sum- 
mons from the dean of St. Patrick's, to appear hefore him as the 
vicarial representative of the archbishop of Dublin. The bishop 
of Ossory made aiaswer that it was not safe for him to undertake 
the journey, because his way lay through the lands and lordship 
of his enemy. Sir Arnald, but this excuse was not admitted, and 
the diocese was relieved from the interdict. 

Other trials were reserved for the mortified prelate. On the 
Monday after the octaves of Easter, the seneschal, Arnald le 
Poer, held his court of justice in the judicial hall of the city of 
Kilkenny, and there the bishop of Ossory resolved to present 
himself and invoke publicly the aid of the secular arm to his 
assistance in seizing the persons accused of sorcery. The sen- 
eschal forbade him to enter the court on his peril ; but the bish- 
op persevered, and '' robed in his pontificals, carrying in his 
hands the body of Christ (the consecrated host), in a vessel of 
gold," and attended by a numerous body of friars and clergy, he 
entered the hall and forced his way to the tribunal. The sen- 
eschal received him with reproaches and insults, and caused him 
to be ignominiously turned out of court. At the repeated protest, 
however, of the offended prelate, and the intercession of some 
influential persons there present, he was allowed to return, and 
the seneschal ordered him to take his place at the bar allotted 
for criminals, upon w^hich the bishop cried out that Christ had 
never been treated so before since he stood at the bar before Pon- 
tius Pilate. He then called upon the seneschal to cause the per- 
sons accused of sorcery to be seized upon and delivered into his 
hands, and, upon his refusal to do this, he held open the book 
of the decretals and said, " You, Sir Arnald, are a knight, and 
instructed in letters, and that you may not have the plea of igno- 
rance in this place, we are prepared here to show in these de- 
cretals that you and your officials are bound to obey my order in 
this respect under heavy penalties." 

" Go to the church with your decretals," replied the seneschal, 
" and preach there, for here you will not find an attentive au- 
dience." \ 

The bishop then read aloud the names of the offenders, and the 
crimes imputed to them, summoned the seneschal to deliver tliem 
up to the jurisdiction of the church, and retreated from the court. 

3* 



30 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Sir Arnald le Poer and Lis friends had not been idle on their 
part, and the bishop was next cited to defend himself against va- 
rious charges in the parliament to be held at Dublin, while the 
lady Alice indicted him in a secular court for defamation. The 
bishop is represented as having narrowly escaped the snares 
which were laid for him on his way to Dublin ; he there found 
the Irish prelates not much incljned to advocate his cause, be- 
cause they looked upon him as a foreigner and an interloper, and 
he was spoken of as a truant monk from England, who came 
thither to represent the " Island of Saints" as a nest of heretics, 
and to plague them with papal bulls of which, they never heard 
before'. It was, however, thought expedient to preserve the credit 
of the church, and some of the more influential of the Irish ec- 
clesiastics interfered to effect at least an outward reconciliation 
between the seneschal and the bishop of Ossory. After encoun- 
tering an infinity of new obstacles and disappointments, the lat- 
ter at length obtained the necessary power to bring the alleged 
oflenders to a trial, and most of them were imprisoned, but the 
chief object of the bishop's proceedings, the lady Alice, had been 
conveyed secretly away, and she is said to have passed the rest 
of her life in England. When her son, William Outlawe, was 
cited to appear before the bishop in his court in the church of 
St. Mary at Kilkenny, he went " armed to the teeth" with all 
sorts of armor, and attended with a very formidable company, 
and demanded a copy of the charges objected against him, which 
extended through thirty-four chapters. He for the present was 
allowed to go at large, because nobody dared to arrest him, and 
when the officers of the crown arrived they showed so openly 
their favor toward him as to take up their lodgings at his house. 
At length, however, having been convicted in the bishop's court 
at least of harboring those accused of sorcery, he consented to 
go into prison, trusting probably to the secret protection of the 
great barons of the land. 

The only person mentioned by name as punished for the ex- 
treme crime of sorcery was Petronilla de Meath, who was, per- 
haps, less provided with worldly interests to protect her, and 
who appears to have been made an expiatory sacrifice for her 
superiors. She was, by order of the bishop six times flogged, 
and then, probably to escape a further repetition of this cruel and 
degrading punishment, she made public confession, accusing not 
only herself but all the others against whom the bishop had pro- 
ceeded. She said that in all England, " perhaps in the whole 
world," there was not a person more deeply skilled in the prac- 



THE LADY ALICE KYTELER. 31 

tices of sorcery than the lady Alice Kyteler, who had been their 
mistress and teacher in the art. She confessed to most of the 
charges contained in the bishop's articles of accusation, and said 
that she had been present at the sacrifices to the demon, and had 
assisted in making the unguents of the intestines of the cocks 
offered on this occasion, mixed with spiders and certain black 
worms like scorpions, v>^ith a certain herb called millefoil, and 
other herbs and worms, and with the brains and clothes of a child 
that had died without baptism, in the manner before related ; that 
with these unguents they had produced various effects upon dif- 
ferent persons, making the faces of certain ladies appear horned 
like goats ; that she had been present at the nightly conventicles, 
and with the assistance of her mistress had frequently pronounced 
the sentence of excommunication against her own husband, with 
all the ceremonies required by their unholy rites ; that she had 
been with the lady Alice when the demon, Robin Artisson, ap- 
peared to her, and had seen acts pass between them, in her pres- 
ence, which we shall not undertake to describe. The wretched 
woman, having made this public confession, was carried out into 
the city and publicly burnt. This, says the relator, was the first 
witch who was ever burnt in Ireland. 

The rage of the bishop of Ossory appears now to have been, 
to a certain dearee, appeased. He was prevailed upon to remit 
the offences of William Outlawe, enjoining him, as a reparation 
for his contempt of the church, that within the period of four 
years he should cover with lead the whole roof of his cathedral 
from the steeple eastward, as well as that of the chapel of the 
holy Virgin. The rest of the lady Alice's " pestiferous society" 
were punished in different ways, with more or less severity ; one 
or two of them, we are told, were subsequently burnt ; others 
were flogged publicly in the market-place and through the city ; 
others were banished from the diocese ; and a few, like their 
mistress, fled to a distance, or concealed themselves so eff'ectual- 
ly as to escape the hands of justice. 

There was one person concerned in the foregoing events whom, 
the bishop had not forgotten or forgiven. That was Arnald le 
Poer, the seneschal of Kilkenny, who had so strenuously advo- 
cated the cause of William Outfawe and his mother, and who 
had treated with so much rudeness the bishop himself. The 
Latin narrative of this history, published for the Camden Society 
by the writer of this paper, gives no further information respect- 
ing him, but we learn from other sources that the bishop now- 
accused him of heresy, had him excommunicated, and obtained 



33 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

a writ by which he was committed prisoner to the castle of Dub- 
lin. Here he remained in 1328, when Roger Outlaw e was made 
lord-justice of Ireland, who attempted to mitigate his sufferings. 
The bishop of Ossor)^, enraged at the lord-justice's humanity, 
accused him also of heresy and of abetting heretics ; upon which 
a parliament was called, and the different accusations having 
been duly examined, Arnald le Peer himself would probably have 
been declared innocent and liberated from confinement, but be- 
fore the end of the investigation he died in prison, and his body, 
lying under sentence of excommunication, remained long un- 
buried. 

The bishop, Avho had been so great a persecutor of heresy in 
othei's, was at last accused of the same crime himself, and the 
case being laid before the archbishop of Dublin, he appealed to 
the apostolic see, fled the country privately, and repaired to Italy. 
Subsequent to this, he appears to have experienced a variety of 
troubles, and he suffered .banishment during nine years. He 
died at a very great age in. 1360. The bishop's party boasted 
that the "nest" of sorcerers who had infested Ireland was entirely 
rooted out by the prosecution of the lady Alice Kyteler and her 
accomplices. It may, however, be well doubted, if the belief in 
witchcraft were not rather extended by the publicity and magni- 
tude of these events. Ireland would no doubt afford many equal- 
ly remarkable cases in subsequent times, had the chroniclers 
thought them as well worth recording as the process of a lady of 
rank, which involved some of the leading people in the English 
pale, and which agitated the whole state during several succes- 
sive years. 



TRIAL OF BONIFACE VIH. S3 



CHAPTER III. 

FURTHER POLITICAL USAGE OF THE BELIEF IN SORCERY. THE 

TEMPLARS. 

The history of the lady Alice Kyteler is one of the most re- 
markable examples that the middle ages have left us of the fise 
which might be made of popular superstition as a means of op- 
pression or vengeance, when other more legitimate means were 
wanting. France and Italy had, however, recently presented a 
case in which the belief in sorcery had been used as a wea^pon 
against a still higher personage. 

It is not necessary to enter into a detailed history of the quar- 
rel between the French monarch, Philippe le Bel, and the pope, 
Boniface VIII. It originated in the determination of the king to 
check in his own dominions the power and insolence of the 
church, and the ambitious pretensions of the see of Rome. In 
1303, Philippe's ministers and agents, having collected pretended 
evidence in Italy, boldly accused Boniface of heresy and sor- 
cery ; and the king called a council at Paris, to hear witnesses 
and pronounce judgment. The pope resisted, and refused to ac- 
knowledge a council not called by himself; but the insults and 
outrages to which he was exposed proved too much for him, and 
he died the same year, in the midst of these vindictive proceed- 
ings. His enemies spread abroad a report that in his last mo- 
ments he had confessed his league with the d^,mon, and that his 
death was attended with " so much thunder and tempest, with 
dragons flying in the air and vomiting flames, and such lightning 
and other prodigies, that the people of Rome believed that the 
whole city was going to be swallowed up in the abyss." His 
successor, Benedict XL, undertook to defend his memory; but 
he died in the first year of his pontificate (in 1304), it Avas said 
by poison, and the holy see remained vacant during eleven 
months. In the middle of June, 1305, a Frenchman, the arch- 
bishop of Bordeaux, was elected to the papal chair under the title 
of Clement V. 

It was understood that Clement was raised to the papacj' in^-a 
great measure by the king's influence, who is said to have stipu- 
lated, as one of the conditions, that he should allow of the pro- 



34 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

ceedings against Boniface, which were to make his memory 
infamous. Preparations were again made to carry on the trial 
of Boniface, but the king's necessities compelled him to seek 
other boons of the supreme pontifl", in consideration of which he 
agreed to drop the prosecution; and at last, in 1312, Boniface 
was declared in the council of Vienne innocent of all the offences 
with which he had been charged. 

Whatever may have been Boniface's faults, to screen the repu- 
tation of a pope was to save the character of the church. If we 
may place any faith at all in the witnesses who were adduced 
against him, Boniface was at bottom a free-thinker, who con- 
cealed, under the mitre the spirit of mockery which afterward 
shone forth in his countryman Rabelais, and that in moments of 
relaxation, especially among those with whom he was familiar, 
he was in the habit of speaking in bold, even in cynical language, 
of things which the church regarded as sacred. Persons were 
brought forward who deposed to having heard expressions from 
the lips of the pope, which, if not invented or exaggerated, savor 
of infidelity, and even of atheism. Other persons deposed that 
it was commonly reported in Italy that Boniface had communica- 
tion with demons, to whom he offered his worship, whom he 
bound to his service by necromancy, and by whose agency he 
acted.* They said further, that he had been heard to hold con- 
versation with spirits in the night ; that he had a certain " idol," 
in which a " diabolical spirit" was enclosed, whom he was in 
the habit of consulting ; while others said that he had a demon 
enclosed in a ring which he wore on his finger. f The witnesses 
in general spoke of these reports only as things which they had 
heard ; but one, a friar, brother Bernard de Sorano, deposed that 
when Boniface W^s« a cardinal, and held the office of notary to 

^ Quod ipse tlmrisabat et sacriiicabat dEemonibus, et spiritiis diabolicos citendo 
arte uigromantica constringebat, et quicquid agebat per actus diabolicos exercebat. 
— Ditpvy, Preuves, p. 528. 

t Audivit dici quod ipse Bonifacius utebatur consilio dsenioniim, et habebat dae- 
tnonem iuciusum in annulo. According to the popular report, spread abroad by bis 
enemies, when Boniface was dying, be tore this ring from his iinger, and dashed it 
oil the ground, reproaching the demon wiih having deserted him at bis greatest 
need. 

Spirits confined in rings are often mentioned among the magical operations of the 
middle ages, and occur as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wben 
such rings appear to have been brought from Spain, the seat of the ancient celebra- 
ted scbpol of magicians. Bodinus (DcBmonomania, lib. ii , c. 3) speaks of a magician 
condemned in the duchy of Gueldies, in 1548, who had a demon confined in a ring 
(dajmonem sibi esse inclusum annulo fatebatur) ; and he mentions as having come 
■within his own knowledge the case of a man who bought of a Spaniard a spirit 
with a ring. — (lb., lib. iii., c. 6.) Magical rings are by no means uncommon in the 
cabinets of collectors, 



HERETICS AT ORLEANS. 35 

Nicholas III., he lay with the papal army before the castle of 
Puriano, and he (brother Bernard) was sent to receive the sur- 
render of the castle. He returned with the cardinal to Viterbo, 
where he was lodged in the palace. Late one night, as he and 
the cardinal's chamberlain were looking out of the window of 
the room he occupied, they saw Benedict of Gaeta (which was 
Boniface's name before he was made pope) enter a garden ad- 
joining the palace, alone, and in a mysterious manner. He made 
a circle on the ground with a sword, and placed himself in the 
middle, having with him a cock, and a fire in an earthen pot (in 
qiiadam olla terrea). Having seated himself in the middle of the 
circle, he killed the cock and threw its blood in the fire, from 
which smoke immediately issued, while Benedict read in a cer- 
tain book to conjure demons. Presently brother Bernard beard 
a great noise (rumorem raagnum), and was much terrified. Then 
he could distinguish the voice of some one saj'ing, " Give us the 
share," upon which Benedict took the cock, threw it out of the 
garden, and walked away without uttering a v.'ord. Though he 
met several persons on his way, he spoke to nobody, but pro- 
ceeded immediately to a chamber near that of brother Bernard, 
and shut himself up. Bernard declared that, though he knew 
there Avas nobody in the room with the cardinal, he not only 
heard him all night talking, but he could distinctly perceive a 
strange voice answering him. This voice, of course, was that 
of a demon.* 

The same charge that had been brought forward to confound 
Pope Boniface, was made a principal ground of persecution 
against the templars. It was by no means the first time that 
people who associated together thus in mutual confidence, or for 
mutual support and protection, were branded with the accusation, 
of holding intercourse with dem.ons, as we have already seen in. 
the case of the Waldenses, who Avere hated for their heresy, and 
the Rentiers, who were detested for their outrages. We might 
easily collect other -examples. A French antiquary, M. Guerard, 
has printed, in the cartulary of St. Peter's at Chartres, a docu- 
ment of the earlier part of the eleventh century, which describes 
a sect of heretics that had arisen in the city of Orleans, whose 
proceedings are described as too horrible to be translated here 
from the original Latin of the narrator. f Just two centuries later, 

* All tlie documents relating to the trinl of this pnpe have been collected and 
printed by Dupuj', in his " Histuire du Different de Boniface VIII. avec Philippe je 
Bel," 4to. _ _ '-^ 

t Congregabantur siquidem certis noctibus in domo denominata, singuli lucernas 
tenentes in manibus, et, ad instar letaniaB, daemouum nomina declamabant, donee 



3G SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

the inhabitants of the district of Steding, ths modern Oldenberg, 
a race of people who lived in sturdy independence, were at vari- 
ance with the archbishop of Bremen. The quarrel had arisen 
from disputed claims to tithes of the land and the right of hunt- 
ing in their forests. The archbishop resented this contempt of 
the church, declared that the Stedingers were heretics, and pro- 
claimed a crusade against them. At first they contended with 
success against their enemies, repulsed them with valor, and for 
some years set the archbishop at defiance. But Archbishop Ge- 
rard, who came to the see of Bremen in 1219, resolved to sup- 
press them. One day, a greedy priest, who had been oftended 
at the small fee given him by a noble lady of this country adter 
confession, took his revenge by thrusting the money into her 
mouth instead of the consecrated host, when she was communi- 
cating. The husband of the lady resented this affront by slaying 
the priest. The archbishop launched against the murderer the 
sentence of excommunication ; but he set the power of the church 
at defiance, and the Stedingers rose up in his cause. The arch- 
bishop, with the assistance of the neighboring princes, invaded 
their district ; but they resisted with so much courage, that he 
was driven, back. 

The archbishop now applied to the pope, and accused the 
Stedingers of being obstinate heretics. Gregory IV., who at 
that time occupied the papal chair, addressed a bull, in 1232, to 
the bishops of Minden, Liibeck, and Ratzeburg, ordering them to 
preach a crusade against the offending population ; and in the 
year following a second bull was addressed to the bishops of 
Paderborn, Hildesheim, Verden, Miiiister, and Osnabriick, which 
repeated this order more pressingly, and gave the special charge 
of the war to the archbishop of Maintz and Conrad of Marburg. 
In the year 1234, an army of forty thousand men overran and 
laid waste the district of Steding; a considerable portion of the 
population fell in battle, and the rest engaged to make reparation 
to the archbishop, and to be obedient to him in future, and they 

subito dasmonem in similitudine cnjuslibet bcstiolae inter eosviderent descendere. 
Qui statim ut visibilis ilia videbatur visio, omnibus extinctis luminaribns, quara pri- 
mum qnisque polerat mulierem qiite ad manuni sibi veniebat, ad ahutendum arri- 
piebat, sine peccad respecta et ulrani mater aut soror aut monacha babereter; pro 
sanctitate ac religione ejus concubitus ab illis Eestimabatur. Ex quo spurcissimo 
concubita infans generatus, ocfava die in medio eonam copioso igne accensn piaba- 
tur per ignem, more antiquorum pagaiiorum, et sic in igne cremabatur. Cujiiacinis 
tanta veneratione colligebatur atque cuslodiebatur, ut Chrisliaua religiositas coipus 
Chrisd custodiri solet, ffigrie dandum de hoc seculo exitnris ad viaticum. Inerat 
enim tanta vis diabolicss fraudis in ipso cinere. ut quicunque de prsefata bajresi im- 
butus fuesset etde eodem cinere quamvis sumendo parum piselibavisset, vix unquam 
postea de eadem hisresi gressuxn mentis ad viam veritatis dirigere valeret. 



THE STEDINGERS. 37 

were thereupon released from the sentence of excommunica- 
tion. 

When the archbishop of Bremen invented the charge of heresy 
against the Stedingers, he seems to have culled from the ac- 
counts of the heresies of the primitive church a choice collection 
of horrible accusations. In the pope's first bull, the Stedingers were 
accused of contempt and hostility toward the church ; of savage 
barbarity, especially toward monks ; of scorning the sacrament ; 
and of holding communication with demons, making images of 
wax, and consulting with witches. But Gregory's second bull 
contains more details of the charges brought against them, and 
gives the following strange and wild account of the_ ceremonies 
attending the initiation of a new convert into their sect. When 
the novice was first introduced into their " school," we are told a 
toad made its appearance, which they kissed, some behind, and 
others on the mouth ; and they drew its tongue and spittle into 
their mouths. Sometimes this toad'appeared of a natural size; 
at other times it was as big as a goose or duck ; but its usual 
size was that of an oven. As the novice proceeded, he was met 
by a man, v/ho was wonderfully pale, with great black eyes, and 
his body so wasted and thin, that his flesh seemed to be all gone, 
and he appeared to have nothing but skin hanging upon his bones. 
The novice kissed this creature, and found that he was as cold 
as ice ; and " after the kiss, all remembrance of the catholic faith 
vanished entirely from his heart." Then they all sat down to 
the banquet, and when they rose again, there stepped out of a 
statue, which was usually found in these schools, a black cat, 
double the size of a moderate dog : it came backward, with its 
tail turned up. The novice first, then the master, and afterward 
the others, one after another, kissed the cat as it presented it- 
self ; and when they had returned to their places^ they remained 
in silence, with their heads inclined toward the cat, and the mas- 
ter suddenly pronounced the words, " Save us." He addressed 
this to the next in order, and the third ansv/ered, " We know it, 
lord ;" upon which a fourth added, " We have to obey." After 
this ceremony was performed, the candles were extinguished, 
and they proceeded indiscriminately to acts which can hardly be 
described. When this was over, the candles were again lighted, 
and they resumed their places ; and then out of a dark corner of 
the room cam.e a man, the upper part of whom, above the loins, 
was bright and radiant as the sun, and the lower part was rough 
and hairy like a cat, and his brightness illuminated the whole 
room. Then the master tore off a bit of the garment of the nov- 

4 



38 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

ice, and said to the shining" personage, '• Mafiter, this is given to 
me, and I give it again to ihee ;" to which he replied, " Tliou 
hast served me well, and thou wilt serve me more and better ; 
what thou hast given me, I give into thy keeping." Immediately 
after this the shining personage vanished, and the meeting broke 
up. The bull further charges these people with Avorshipping 
Lucifer ; and contains other articles, evidently borrowed from 
ths creed of the ancient gnostics and Manichseans, and their kin- 
dred sects. 

Such is the statement gravely made in a formal instrument by 
the head of the church. At the first outbreak of the quarrel be- 
tween the Stedingers and the see of Bremen, no one appears to 
have thought of charging them with these horrible acts. They 
-were invented only when the force which the archbishop could 
command was not sufficient to reduce them ; and singularly 
enough, when they had submitted, the charge of heresy, with all 
its concomitant scandals, seems to have been entirely forgotten. 
The archbishop of Bremen with the Stedingers, like Philippe le 
Bel with, the templars, began by defaming the cause which he 
wished to destroy. The prelate was incited by the love of tem- 
poral authority, the king by the want of gold. 

The military order of the templars was founded early in the 
twelfth century, for the protection of the holy sepulchre ; its 
members, by their conduct, merited the eulogy of St. Bernard, 
and on many occasions their bravery saved the Christian inte- 
rests in the East. But the order soon became extraordinarily 
rich, and wealth, as usual, brought with it a host of corruptions 
and attendaiit vices. The writers of the twelfth century com- 
plain that the templars had degenerated much from the virtue 
which originally characterized the order ; and in the century fol- 
lowing "the pride of a templar" became a proverbial saying. 
The new knight was received into the order at a private initia- 
tion, with various forms and ceremonies, having partly a literal 
and partly a symbolical meaning. Some of these appear to have 
been repeated and corrupted after their real intention was forgot- 
ten ; and it is not impossible that in the course of the familiar re- 
lations which they are said to have held with the infidels, some 
of them may have learned and adopted many doctrines and prac- 
tices which were inconsistent with their profession.* It is cer- 

*Some years ago,- Von Hammer Purgstall, in an elaborate essay publisbed in tbe 
IFnndgiubeu des Orients, attempted to show from medieval nioniimente, that the 
order of tiie templars was infested with gnosticism : but his error has been pointed 
out by more tlian one subsequent writer. In fact, Von Hammer totally misunder- 
stood "the character of tbe monuments on which he built his theory. 



THE KNIGHTS-TEMPLARS. 39 

tain, that before the end of the thirteenth century, rumors were 
spread abroad of strange practices, and still stranger vices^ in 
which the templars were said to indulge. The mysterious se- 
crecy which they maintained, their pride, riches, and power, 
were quite sufficient grounds in a superstitious age for such 
charges. Their power made them an object of alarm to the sov- 
ereigns of the va.rious countries in which they were established, 
but their riches proved the cause of their fiaal doom. 

The treasury of Philippe le Bel had been long exhausted, and 
he had already tried a variety of expedients for the purpose of 
raising money, when, in the first years of the fourteenth century, 
he determined to recruit his finances by seizing the immense 
property of the templars. The sinister reports, already believed 
by many, were encouraged ; vague complaints against the corrup- 
tions of the templars were carried to the pope, and the king of 
France urged that an inquiry should be instituted. At length 
one or more knights of the order were induced to make a volun- 
tary confession of the enormities which they pretended were 
practised by the templars in their secret conclaves, and then the 
pontiff yielded to the urgent demands of King Philippe, and 
agreed that they should be brought to a trial. The richest pos-_ 
sessions of the order were in France, for the Temple in Paris 
was their grand central establishment ; and hence Philippe le 
Bel assumed the right of directing and presiding over the process 
which was to be carried on against them. He had offered him- 
self as a candidate for admission into the order, and been refused. 

'J'he knights themselves appear to have had a presentiment of 
their impending fate, and to have been alarmed at the extent of 
the popular feeling against them. An English templar meeting 
a knight who had been newly received into the order, inquired 
if he had been admitted, and the latter having replied affirma- 
tively, he added, '" If you should sit on the top of the steeple of 
St. Paul's in London, you should not be able to see greater mis- 
fortunes than shall happen to you before you die." The rumors 
against the order were increased by indiscreet confessions and 
boasts of a few individuals, which seemed to give consistence to 
them. A templar had said to one who did not belong to the 
order, that in their chapter-general " there was a thing in secret 
that if any one had the misfortune to see it, even were it the 
king of France himself, nothing would hinder those of the chap- 
ter from killing him, if it were in their power." Another said, 
" We have three articles among us in our order, which none^ 
will ever know, except God and the devil, and we the brethren 



40 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

of the order." Many stories were reported of individuals who 
had been secretly put to death, because they had been witnesses, 
by design or accident, of the secret ceremonies of the temple, 
and of the terrible dungeons into which the chiefs of the- order 
threw its disobedient members. One of the knights declared 
that his uncle " had entered the order in good health, and cheer- 
ful, with his dogs and falcons, and that in three days he was 
dead ;" and one witness examined before the commission by 
which the cause of the templars was tried, deposed that he had 
heard several templars say that there were points beside those 
mentioned in the public rules of the order, " which they would 
not mention for their heads." 

In the autumn of the year 1307, the king of France struck the 
blow which he had been some time contemplating. He invited 
the grand master, Jaques de Molay, and the chiefs of the order 
in France, to Paris, under pretence of showing them his favor, 
and received them with every mark of attachment. After hav- 
ing acted as godfather to one of the king's sons, the grand master 
was one of the pall-bearers at the burial of his sister-in-law on 
the twelfth of October. Next day, Jaques de Molay, and a hun- 
dred and forty templars who were in Paris on this occasion, 
were arrested and thrown into prison. The same day thirty 
were arrested at Beaucaire, and immediately afterward the tem- 
plars in all parts of France were seized. The publication of 
scandalous reports, the invectives of the monkish preachers, an 
inflammatory letter of the king, every method was employed to 
excite the people against them. The grand master, and soiue of 
the principal brethren of the order arrested in Paris, were carried 
before the imiversity, and examined on certain articles of accusa- 
tion, founded, it was said, on the voluntary confession of two 
knights of the order, a Gascon and an Italian, who, imprisoned 
for some ofi^ences against the law^ had revealed the secrets of the 
order. These pretended secrets were now made public, proba- 
bly with much exaggeration and addition. The templars were 
accused of renouncing the faith of the church, and of spitting and 
trampling upon the cross, of using ceremonies of a disgusting 
character at their initiations, and of secret practices of the most 
revolting description. The general character of the act of accu- 
sation against the templars bore a close resemblance to that of 
the earlier bull against the Stedingers. It was said that they 
worshipped the evil one in the shape of an idol, which they 
looked upon as the patron of their order, and as the author of all 
their riches and prosperity, and that they were individually pro- 



THE KNIGHTS-TEMPLARS. 41 

tected by a cord that had been passed with mystic ceremony 
round the idol, and which they wore as a girdle at the waist. 
This idol they were accused of consecrating, by anointing it with 
the fat of a new-born infant, the illegitimate offspring of a brother 
of the order.* A more rational charge was that, founded on the 
intimate intercourse with the Saracens, of having betrayed the 
Christians of the East to their unbelieving enemies. They were 
even accused of having^ entered into the service of the sultan. 
It was said, further, that they refused to receive the sacraments 
from those who were alone authorized by the church to commu- 
nicate them, and that they confessed only to one another and to 
their chiefs. 

The process dragged on slowly during more than three years, 
in consequence of the jealousies which arose among those who 
were more or less interested in its prosecution. The pope 
wished to bring it entirely under the jurisdiction of the church, 
and to have it decided at Rome. The king, on the other hand, 
mistrusting the pope, and resolved on the destruction of the order, 
and that none but himself should reap the advantage of it, de- 
cided that it should be judged at Paris under his own personal 
influence. The prosecution was directed by his ministers, No- 
garet and Enguerrand de Marigny. The templars asserted their 
innocence, and demanded a fair trial ; but they found few advo- 
cates who would undertake their defence, and they were sub- 
jected to hardships and tortures which forced many of them into 
confessions dictated to them by their persecutors. During this 
interval, the pope's orders were carried into other countries, or- 
dering the arrest of the templars, and the seizure of their goods, 
and everywhere the same charges were brought against them, 
and the same means adopted to procure their condemnation, 
although they were not everywhere subjected to the same sever- 
ity as in France. At length, in the spring of 1316, the grand 
process was opened in Paris, and an immense number of tem- 
plars, brought from all parts of the kingdom, underwent a public 
examination. A long act of accusation was read, some of the 
heads of which were, that the templars, at their reception into 
the order, denied Christ, and sometimes they denied expressly 
all the saints, declaring that he was not God truly, but a false 
prophet, a man who had been punished for his crimes ; that they 

■* Car encore faisoient-il pis, car uii enfant nouvel eng-endre d'un templier en una L 
puoelle estoit cnit et rosli au fea, et toute la gr^se ostee ; et de celle estoit sacrfee 
et ointe leur ydole. — Les grandes Chrotdques ae St. Denis, ed. de Paalin Paris, 
torn. Vj, p. 190. 



42 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

had no hope of salvation through him ; that they always, at their 
initiation into the order, spit upon the cross, and trod it under 
foot ; that they did this especially on Good Friday ; that they 
worshipped a certain cat, which sometimes appeared to them in . 
their congregation ;* that they did not believe in any of the sac- 
raments of the church ; that they took secret oaths which they 
were bound not to reveal ; that the brother who officiated at the 
reception of a new brother kissed the naked body of the latter, 
often in a very unbecoming manner ; that each different province of 
the order has its idol, which was a head, having sometimes three 
faces, and at others only one ; or sometimes a human skull ;t 
these idols they worshipped in their chapters and congregations, 
believing that tliey had the power of making them rich, and of 
causing the trees to flourish, and the earth to become fruitful ; 
that they girt themselves with cords, with which these idols had 
been superstitiously touched ; that those who betrayed the se- 
crets of their order, or were disobedient, were thrown into pris- 
on, and often put to death ; that they held their chapters secretly 
and by night, and placed a watch to prevent them from any da.n- 
ger of interruption or discovery ; and that they believed the 
grand-master alone had the power of absolving them from their 
sins. The publication of these charges, and the agitation which 
had been designedly got up, created such a horror throughout 
France, that the templars who died during the process were 
treated as condemned heretics, and burial in consecrated ground 
was refused to their remains. 

When we read over the numerous examinations of the tem- 
plars, in other countries, as well as in France, we can not but 
feel convinced that some of these charges had a degree of found- 
ation, though perhaps the circumstances on which they were 
founded were misunderstood. A very great number of knights 
agreed to the general points of the formula of initiation, and we 
can not but believe that they did deny Christ, and that they spit 
and trod upon the cross. The words of tlie denial were, Je 
renetj Deu, or Je reney Jhesu, repeated thrice ; but most of those 
who confessed having gone through this ceremony, declared 
that they did it with repugnance, and that they spit beside the 
cross, and not on it. The reception took place in a secret room, 
with closed doors ; the candidate was compelled to take off part 

* Item, quod adorabant queiidam catara sibi in ipsa congregatione apparentem 
quandoque. 

t Item, quod ipsi per singulas jprovincias habebant ydola, videlicet capita quo- 
rum aliquahabebant tres facias et aliqua unam, at aliqua craneum liumanum liab- 
ebaut. 



THE KNIGHTS-TEMPLARS. 43 

or all of Ills garments (very rarely the latter), and then he was 
kissed on various parts of tlae body. One of the knights exam- 
ined, Guischard de Marzici, said he remembered the reception 
of Hugh de Marhaud, of the diocese of Lyons, whom he saw 
taken into a small room, which was closed up so that no one 
conld see or hear what took place within ; but that when, after 
some time, he was let out, he was very pale, and looked as 
though he \^e.re troubled and amazed {fuit valde pallidus et qua- 
si lurbatus et stupefactus). In conjunction, however, with these 
strange and revolting ceremonies, there were others that showed 
a reverence for the Christian church and its ordinances, a pro- 
found faith in Christ, and the consciousness that the partaker of 
them was entering into a holy vow. 

M. Michelet, who has carefully investigated the materials re- 
lating to the trial of the templars, has suggested at least an in- 
genious explanation of these anomalies. He imagines that the 
form of reception was borrowed from the figurative mysteries 
and rites of the early church. The candidate for admission 
inty the order, according to this notion, was first presented as a 
sinner and renegade, in which character, after the example of 
St. Peter, he denied Christ. This denial was a sort of panto- 
mime, in which the novice expressed his reprobate state by spit- 
ting on the cross. The candidate was then stripped of his pro- 
fane clothing, received through the kiss of the order into a high- 
er state of faith, and redressed with the garb of its holiness. 
Forms like these would, in the middle ages, be easily misunder- 
stood, and their original meaning soon forgotten. 

Another charge in the accusation of the templars seems to 
have been to a great degree proved by the depositions of wit- 
nesses ; the idol or head which they were said to have worship- 
ped, but the real character or meaning of which we are totally 
unable to explain. Many templars confessed to having seen 
this idol, but as they described it differently, we must suppose 
that it was not in all cases represented under the same form. 
Some said it was a frightful head, with long beard and sparkling 
eyes ; others said it was a man's skull ; some described it as 
having three faces ; some said it was of wood, and others of 
metal ; one witness described it as a painting [tabula picta) rep- 
resenting the image of a man [ifnago hominis), and said that 
when it was shown to him, he was ordered to " adore Christ his 
creator." According to some, it was a gilt figure, either of wood 
or metal ; while others described it as painted black and white. 
According to another deposition, the idol had four feet, two be- 



44 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

fore and two behind ; the one belonging to the order at Paris 
was said to be a silver head, with two faces and a beard. The 
novices of the order were told always to regard this idol as 
their savior. Deodatiis JaR'et, a knight from the south of France, 
who had been received at Pedenat, deposed that the person who 
in his case performed the ceremonies of reception, showed him 
a head or idol, which appeared to have three faces, and said, 
" You must adore this as your savior, and the savior of the order 
of the Temple," and that he was made to.worship the idol, say- 
ing, " Blessed be he who shall save my soul." Cetus Ragonis, 
a knight received at Rome in a chamber of the palace of the 
Lateran, gave a somewhat similar account. Many other wit- 
nesses spoke of having seen these heads, which, however, were, 
perhaps, not shown to everybody, for the greatest number of 
those who spoke on this subject, said that they had heard speak 
of the head, but that they had never seen it themselves ; and 
many of them declared their disbelief in its existence. A. friar 
minor deposed in England that an English templar had assured 
him that in that country the order had four principal idols, one 
at London in the sacristy of the Temple, another at Bristelham, 
a third at Brueria (Bruern in Lincolnshire), and a fourth beyond 
the Humber. 

Some of the knights from the south added another circum- 
stance in their confessions relating to this head. A templar of 
Florence, declared that, in the secret meetings of the chapters, 
one brother said to the others, showing them the idol, " Adore 
this head. This head is your God and your Mahomet." An- 
other, Gauserand de Montpesant, said, that the idol was made in 
the figure of Baffomet {in figuram Baffometi) ; and another, Ray- 
mond Rubei, described it as a wooden head, on which was 
painted the figure of Baphomet, and he adds, " that he worship- 
ped it by kissing its feet, and exclaiming, Yalla," which he de- 
scribes as " a word of the Saracens " {yerbum Saracenorum). 
This has been seized upon by some as a proof that the templars 
had secretly embraced Mahometanism, as Baifomet or Baphomet 
is evidently a corruption of Mahomet ; but it must not be for- 
gotten that the Christians of the West constantly used the word 
Mahomet in the mere signification of an idol, and that it was the 
desire of those who conducted the prosecution against the tem- 
plars to show their intimate intercourse with the Saracens. 
Others, especially Von Hammer, gave a Greek derivation of the 
word, and assumed it as a proof that gnosticism was the secret 
doctrine of the Temple. 



THE KNIGHTS-TEMPLARS. ' 45 

The confessions with regard to the mysterious cat were much 
rarer and more vague. Some Italian knights confessed that 
they had been present at a secret chapter of twelve knights held 
at Brindisi, at which a gray cat suddenly appeared among them, 
and that they worshipped it. At Nismes, some templars de- 
clared that they had been present at a chapter at Montpelier, 
at which the demon appeared to them in the form of a cat, and 
promised them worldly prosperity; and added, that they saw 
devils in the shape of women. Gilletus de Encreyo, a templar 
of the diocese of Rheims, who disbelieved in the story of the 
cat, deposed that he had heard say, though he knew not by 
whom, that in some of their battles beyond sea, a cat had ap- 
peared to them.* An English knight, who was examined at 
London, deposed, that in England they did not adore the cat or 
the idol to his knowledge, but he had heard it positively stated 
that they worshipped the cat and the idol in parts beyond sea.f 
English witnesses deposed to other acts of " indolatry." It was 
of course the demon, who presented himself in the form of the 
cat. A lady, named Agnes Lovecote, examined in England, 
stated that she had heard that, at a chapter held at Dineslee 
(Dynnesiey in Hertfordshire), the devil appeared to the templars 
in a monstrous form, having precious stones instead of eyes, 
which shone so bright that they illuminated the whole chapter ; 
the brethren, in succession, kissed him on the posteriors, and 
marked there the form of the cross. She Avas told that one 
young man, who refused to go through this ceremony, was 
thrown into a well, and a great stone cast upon him. Another 
witness, Robert de Folde, said that he had heard twenty years 
ago, that in the same place, the devil came to the chapter once 
a year, and flew away with one of the knights, whom he took as 
a sort of tribute. Two others deposed that certain templars 
confessed to them that at a grand annual assembly in the county 
of York, the templars worshipped a calf. All this is mere hear- 
say, but it shows the popular opinion of the conduct of the or- 
der. A templar examined in Paris, named Jacques de Treces, 
who said that he had been informed that at secret chapters held 
at midnight, a head appeared to the assembled brethren, added, 
that one of them " had a private demon, by whose council he 
was wise and rich."| 

* Audivit tamen ab aliquibus dici, de quibus non recordatur quod quidam catus 
apparebat ultra mare ia preliis eorum, quod tamen non credit. 

t _Respondit quod in Aiiglia non adorant catum nee idolum, quod ipse sciat ; sed 
audivit bene dici, quod adorant catum et idolum in pai-tibus transmarinis. 

t Audivit tamen dici postquam fuit in ordine, quod dictus frater Hadulphus babe- 
bat diBmouem privatum, cujus consilio erat sapiens et dives. 



4C SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Absurd as these accusations may appear to us at the present 
day, they were then believed, and helped as much as anything 
else to insure the condemnation of the order. The aim of king 
Philippe was secured; he seized upon the whole treasure of the 
temple in France, and became rich. Those who ventured to 
speak in defence af the order were brow-beaten, and received 
little attention ; the torture was employed to force confessions ; 
fifty-four templars who refused to confess were carried to the 
windmill of St. Antoine, in the suburbs of Paris, and there burnt ; 
and many others, among whom was the grand-master himself, 
were subsequently brought to the stake. After having lasted 
two or three years, the process ended in the condemnation and 
suppression of the order, and its estates were given in some 
countries to the knights of St. John. It was in France that the 
persecution was most cruel ; in England, the order was sup- 
pressed, but no executions took place. Even in Italy, the sever- 
ity of the judges was not everyu'here the same ; in Lombardy 
and Tuscany, the templars were condemned, while they were 
acquitted at Ravenna and Bologna. They were also pronounced 
innocent in Castile', while in Arragon they were reduced by 
force, only because they had attempted to resiat by force of arms ; 
and both in Spain and in Portugal they only gave up their own 
order to be admitted into others. The pope was offended at the 
lenity shown toward them in England, Spain, and Germany. 
The order of the temple was finally dissolved and abolished, and 
its memory branded with disgrace. Some of the knights are 
said to have remained together, and formed secret societies ; 
from one of which it has been supposed that the modern free- 
masons are derived. This, however, is a doubtful question, 
which will perhaps never be cleared up.* 

* The history of the suppression of the templars was treated in a large work by 
the historian Dupuy, in which numerous documents relating to the process were 
printed. M. Baynouard published, in 1813, a critical essay on the subject, in which 
he put himself forward as the champion of tlie order. M. Michelet has more re- 
cently printed the original examinations and other documents of the process in the 
collection of historical documents published by direction of the French government ; 
and he has treated the matter at considerable length and with much research in the 
third volume of his " Histoire de France." A manuscript of the fourteenth century 
in the Cottonian library in the British Museum, (MS Gotten. Julius B. XIL) con- 
tains a considerable portion of the depositions of the witnesses examined in 
England. 



ENGUERRAND DE MARIGNY. " 47 



CHAPTER IV. 

SORCERY IN FRANCE THE CITIZENS OF ARRAS. 

In France, the belief in sorcery appears to have been more 
prevalent at this early period, even than in England, and about 
the middle of the fifteenth century it became the ground of 
one of the most remarkable acts of vi^holesale oppression that 
the history of that age has preserved to us. We have seen 
how, as early as the thirteenth century, the charge of sorcery 
had been used as one of the means of branding with infamy 
the name of the Waldenses or Vaudois ; they were accused of 
selling themselves to the devil, of passing through the air mount- 
ed on broomsticks to a place of general meeting, where they did 
homage to the demon, and where they had preaching, and did 
various acts of impiety and sinfulness. Several persons accused 
of taking part in these meetings were put to death, and the meet- 
ing itself was often characterized by the name of a Vaudoisie or 
a Vavderie. The secresy of the meetings of persecuted religious 
sectaries gave a certain plausible appearance to such stories. 
We have seen, at the commencement-of the fourteenth century, 
the same hated and fearful crime of sorcery deeply mixed up 
with the charges brought against the unfortunate templars ; and 
it was not unfrequently used then and in subsequent times to ruin 
the character of liigh state offenders. 

One of its victims was the powerful minister of Philippe le 
Bel, Enguerrand de Marigny, the same who had conducted the 
execution of the templars, and who thus fell under a stroke of 
the deadly weapon which he had conjured up for the destruction 
of others. After the death of that monarch iu 1315, Enguerrand 
was thrown into prison, and accused of various acts of extortion 
and other crimes in abuse of the confidence of his late master, 
at the instigation of some of the princes of the royal family of 
France, whose enmity he had provoked, especially of the counts 
of Valois and St. Pol. Philippe's successor, Louis, showed 
some inclination to save Enguerrand, and his trial was making 
little progress, when it was suddenly published abroad that he 
had entered into a conspiracy to compass the death of his two 
principal accusers. It was stated that Enguerrand had sent for 
his wife, the lady of Marigny, her sister the lady of Chantelou, 



48 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

and liis brother, the archbishop of Sens, who came to him in his 
prison, and there held counsel together on the best method of 
effecting the deaths of the two counts. The ladies, after leaving 
the prison, sent for a lame woman, who appears to have dealt in 
alchemy — qui fesoit 2'«r^and a mauvais garcoji, named Paviot, 
and promised them a great sum of money if they would make 
" certain faces whereby they might kill the said counts." The 
" faces," or images, were accordingly made of wax, and baptized 
in the devil's name, and so ordered " by art magic," that as they 
dried up the counts would have gradually pined away and died. 
But accidentally, as we are told, the whole matter came to the 
ears of the count of Valois, who gave information to the king, 
and the latter then consented to Enguerrand's death. Enguer- 
rand and Paviot were hanged on one gibbet; the lame woman 
was burnt, and the two ladies were condemned to prison. In. 
1334, the lady of Robert count of Artois, and her son, were 
thrown into prison on a suspicion of sorcery; her husband had 
been banished for crimes of a different nature. 

The chronicle of St. Denis, in which is preserved the account 
of the trial of Enguerrand de Marigny, furnishes a singular in- 
stance of the superstitious feelings of the age. In 1323, a Cis 
tercian abbot was robbed of a very considerable sum of money. 
He went to a man of Chateau-Landon, who had been provost of 
that town, and was known by the name of Jehan le Prevost, to 
consult on the best way of tracing the robbers, and by his advice 
made an agreement with a sorcerer, who undertook to discover 
them and oblige them to make restitution. A box was first made, 
and in it was placed a black cat, with three days' provision of 
bread sopped in cream, oil that had been sanctified, and holy 
water, and the box was then buried in the ground at a cross 
road, two holes having been left in the box, with two long pipes, 
which admitted sufficient air to keep the cat alive. After three 
days the cat was to have been taken out and skinned, and the 
skin cut into thongs, and these thongs being made into a girdle, 
the man who wore it, with certain insignificant ceremo_nies, 
might call upon the evil one, who would immediately come and 
answer any question he put to him. 

It happened, however, that the day after the cat was buried, a 
party of shepherds passed ov^r the spot with their sheep and 
dogs, and the latter, smelling the cat, began to bark furiously 
and tear up the ground with their feet. The shepherds, aston- 
ished at the perseverance with which the dogs continued to 
scratch the ground, brought the then provost of Chateau-Landon 



THE MALADY OF CHARLES VL 49 

to the place, Vv'ho had the ground excavated, and found the box 
and cat. It was at once judged to be an act of sorcery, and was 
the subject of much scandal, but no traces could be discovered 
of the persons who had done it, until at last the provost found 
the carpenter who had made the box for Jehan le Prevost, and 
thus the whole matter ca,me to light, and two persons were burnt 
for the crime. 

Later on in the century, in the reign of the weak Charles VI., 
the superstitions of the vulgar were again mixed up with the 
highest affairs of the state. It was in 1393 that this prince ex- 
perienced the first attack of that painful malady which affected 
his reason, and rendered him unfit for several years to fulfil the 
duties of his high station. People in general ascribed his mad- 
ness to the effects of sorcery, and they pointed to his beloved 
Italian sister-in-law, the young and beautiful duchess of Orleans, 
as the author of it. This lady v/as a visconti, the daughter of 
the rich and powerful duke of Milan : and it appears that at this 
time Lombardy, her native land, was celebrated above all other 
parts for sorcerers and poisoners.* The wise ministers of the 
court judged it necessary to set up one sorcerer against another, 
and a man of this stamp, named Arnaud Guillaume, was brought 
from Guienne to cure the king by his magic. Arnaud was in 
every respect an ignorant pretender, but he possessed a book to 
which he gave the strange title of Smagorad, the original of 
which he said was given by God to Adam, to console him for 
the loss of his son Abel ; and he pretended that any one who 
possessed this book was enabled thereby to hold the stars in sub- 
jection, and to command the four elements and all the objects 
they contained. This man gave credit to the general opinion by 
asserting positively that the king lay under the power of sorce- 
ry ; but he said that the authors of the charm were working so 
strenuously against him, that it yvould take much time before he 
could overcome them. The clfergy, in the meantime, interfered 
to put a stop to proceedings so contrary to the sentiments of the 
church, and the king having recovered, Arnaud Guillaume seems 
to have fallen back into his original obscurity. Another attack 
followed rapidly, but the magician was not recalled, although 
people still believed that their king was bewitched, and they 
now openly accused the duke of Milan himself as the sorcerer. 

In 1397, King Charles was again the victim of a violent at- 

* Allegantes quod in Lombardia, unde ducebat originem, intoxicationes et sorti- 
legia vigebant plas quam aliis partibus. The Chronique du religieux de St. Denis, 
which is my authority for these facts. 



50 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

tack. On tliis occasion the province of Guienne, which appears 
to have been celebrated for persons of this description, contrib- 
uted tow^ard his cure by sending two persons to counteract the 
influence under which he was believed to have fallen. These 
men, who were by profession Augustine friars, were received at 
court with every respect and honor, and were lodged in the cha- 
teau of St. Antoine. They, like their predecessor, delayed their 
operations, amusing people with formalities and promises, while 
they lived in luxury and debauchery, and used their influence 
over people's minds to corrupt their wives' and daughters. At 
last their character became so apparent, that, after having been 
subjected to a fair trial, they were conducted to the Greve at 
Paris', where they were at first publicly degraded from their or- 
der, and then beheaded. But even their fate was no warning to 
others ; for when, in 1403, the king was laboring under another 
attack of his malady, two sorcerers, named Poinson and Bri- 
quet, who resided at Dijon in Burgundy, ofl'ered to eff"ect his 
cure. For this purpose they established themselves in a thick 
wood not far from the gates of Dijon, where they made a magic 
circle of iron of immense weight, which was supported by iron 
columns of the height of a middle-sized man, and to which twelve 
chains of iron were attached. So great was the popular anxiety 
for the king's recovery, that the two sorcerers succeeded in per- 
suading twelve of the principal persons of the town to enter the 
circle, and allow themselves to be fastened by the chains. The 
sorcerers then proceeded with their incantations, but they were 
altogether without result. The bailif of Dijon, who was one of 
the twelve, and had averred his incredulity from the first, caused 
the sorcerers to be aiTested, and they were burnt for their crime. 
The duke of Orleans appears to have fallen under the same 
suspicion of sorcery as his Italian consort. After his murder by 
order of the duke of Burgundy — the commencement of those 
troubles which led to the desolation of France — the latter drew 
up various heads of accusation against his victim as justifications 
of the crime, and one of these was, that the duke of Orleans had 
attempted to compass his death by means of sorcery. Accord- 
ing to this statement, he had received a magician — another 
apostate friar — into his castle of Mountjoie, where he was era- 
ployed in these sinister designs. He performed his magical 
ceremonies before sunrise on a neighboring mountain, where 
two demons, named Herman and Astramon, appeared to him ; 
and these became his active instruments in the prosecution of 
his design. 



WITCHCRAFT AT ARRAS. " 51 

Many other such cases no doubt occurred in the annals of this 
period. Every reader of history knows that the most serious 
crime laid to the charge of Jeanne of Arc was that of sorcery, 
for which chiefly she was condemned to the stake. It was pre- 
tended that she had been in the habit of attending at the witches' 
sabbath which was held on the Thursday night of every week, 
at a fountain by the fairies' oak of Bourlemont, near Domremy, 
her native place ; that thence she was sent forth to cause 
war and slaughter ; that the evil spirits had discovered to her a 
magic sword concealed in the church of St. Catherine at Fier- 
bois, to which, and to charmed rings and banners which she bore 
about with her, she owed her victories ; and that by means of 
sorcery she had gained the confidence and favor of the king 
and the duke of Bourbon. She was gravely condemned on 
these charges by the faculty of theology of the university of 
Paris. 

The belief in the nightly meetings, or sabbath of the witches, 
had now become almost universal. We learn that it was very 
prevalent in Italy about the year 1400, and that many persons 
were accused of having been present at them, and of having 
denied their belief in the church, and done homage to the evil 
one, with various detestable acts and ceremonies. It was half 
a century later that this belief was made the ground-work of a 
series of prosecutions in Artois and Flanders, the only object of 
which appears to have been revenge and extortion. We know 
nothing, however, of the events which preceded and led to them. 
A particular account of the proceedings has been left us by a 
contemporary writer, Jacques du Clerc, who appears to have 
been present, and shorter accounts are preserved in one or 
two of the old historians. The term Vauldois is here used 
simply in the sense of a sorcerer. 

At the time of which we are speaking, a Jacobin monk, named 
Pierre le Broussart, was inquisitor of the faith in the city of Ar- 
ras. About the feast of All-Saints, 1459, a young woman, some- 
what more than thirty years of age, named Demiselle, who 
lived by prostitution [a femme de follie vie), in the city of Douai, 
was suddenly arrested at that place by Pierre le Broussart's or- 
ders, and carried prisoner to Arras, where she was brought be- 
fore the municipal magistrates, and by them, at the inquisitor's 
demand, given over to the ecclesiastical arm, and thrown into 
the bishop's prison. When she asked her persecutors why she 
was thus treated, they only condescended to inform her that sh^^ 
would hear in good time, and one of them asked, by way of rail- 



52 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

lery, if she did not know a hermit named Robinet de Vaulx. She 
replied in consternation, " Et que checy ? cuicle ton que je sois 
Vanldois F" — " And what of that ? do they think me a witch?" 

In fact, Robinet de Vaulx, who was a native of Artois, but 
had lived for some time as a hermit in the province of Burgundy, 
had recently been burnt for the crime of sorcery, or Vaulderie, 
at Langres, and she could only suppose, by the allusion to his 
name, that she was now accused of the same crime. Accord- 
ingly, it was soon afterward made know^n that Pierre le Brous- 
sart had been at the chapter-general of the friars' preachers (or 
Jacobins), held that year at Langres, at which Robinet de Vaulx 
had been condemned ; that on his trial, Robinet had confessed 
that there were a great number of sorcerers in Artois, men and 
women; and, that, among others, he had named this woman, 
Demiselle, dwelling at Douai, and a man named Jehan Levite, 
Avho was known by the nickname of abbe de peu de sens (the 
abbot of little sense). On his return from the chapter, Broussart 
had, as he pretended, acted on this information, and caused De- 
miselle to be arrested. She was examined and put to the tor- 
ture several times before the vicars of the bishop of Arras, and, 
among the rest, master Jacques Dubois, a doctor in theology, 
canon and dean of the church of Notre Dame at Arras, made 
himself most busy and active, and labored most in interrogating 
her. After having been very cruelly tortured, the miserable 
woman was at length induced to confess that she had been pres- 
ent at the Vaulderie, or meeting of sorcerers, where she had seen 
and recognised many persons, and, among others, the said Jehan 
Levite, known as the abbe depeu de sens, who was a painter, and 
then resided at Arras, but where he was at the time of her ex- 
amination she did not know. The inquisitor of the faith, after 
much trouble, found him living at Abbeville in Ponthieu, and 
had him seized and brought to Arras, where he arrived on the 
25th of February, and was immediately committed to the bishop's 
prison. The abbe de peu de sens, at the moment of being taken, 
appears to have lost the little sense he possessed, for he at- 
tempted to cut off his own tongue with a penknife, and maimed 
himself so much that he was for some length of time unable to 
speak. The inquisitors said that he did this to avoid making 
any confession; and they subjected him to a close examination 
and cruel tortures, imtil they forced him to make an avowal in 
writing, that he had been at the Vaulderie, and that he had seen 
there many people of all estates, men and women, nobles and 
burghers, and even ecclesiastics, whose names and surnames he 



V/ITCHCRAFT AT ARRAS. 53 

gave. In consequence of this information, Huguet Carney, a 
barber, known commonly by the name of Paternoster ; Jehan le 
Ferre, a sergeant of the echevins of the city of Arras ; Jeanne 
d'Auvergne, the mistress of the new baths of the city ; and three 
prostitutes of Arras, known by the familiar appellations of Be- 
lotte, Vergengen, and Blancquinette ; were all thrown into the 
bishop's prison, and subjected to the same interrogations and 
tortures as the others. 

When the bishop's A'icars saw the matter going on in this way, 
and the number of persons accused increasing daily, they began 
to dread the consequences, and were inclined to put a stop to the 
proceedings. Indeed, it was understood to be their intention to 
set all the prisoners at liberty at Easter. But Jacques Dubois, 
the dean of Arras, who had already shown himself such an ac- 
tive inquisitor, opposed violently this act of leniency, and offered 
himself as their accuser, being supported in this by a bigoted 
friar minor, John, bishop of Bayrut and suffragan of the church 
of Arras. Still fearful that he might not be successful, the dean 
went to Peronne, and obtained a private interview with the 
count of Estampes,' who came in haste to Arras, called before 
him the bishop's vicars, enjoined them to proceed energetically 
against the prisoners, as it was their duty to do, or he v/ould 
take the affair into his own hands, and then returned to Peronne. 
The vicars did not venture to disobey the count, because, if by 
their negligence they let the cause go out of their court, it im- 
plied a loss or diminution of their privileges. 

The prisoners were again subjected to the torture, and, as it 
appears, the number of persons accused by them was consider- 
ably increased. The bishop's vicars were more and more em- 
barrassed, and tried to relieve themselves by sending a copy of 
the examinations to Cambray, for the advice of Gilles Carlier, a 
doctor of theology, seventy-two years of age, dean of the church 
of Notre Dame of Cambray, and " one of the most notable clerks 
in Christendom, as was said ;" and another " tres notable clerc" 
Master Gregoire Nicollay, canon and official of the bishop of 
Cambray. These two notables, having carefully and attentively 
read the confessions, gave it in writing as their opinion that they 
should only punish the prisoners leniently, and not proceed to 
extremities, if they had committed no murders, and had not 
abused the body of Christ (that is the consecrated host). Master 
Jacques Dubois and the titidar bishop of Bayrut were much irri- 
tated at this decision. They proclaimed it as their opinion that 
the prisoners ought all to be burnt, and that even those who did 

5* 



54 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

not confess should be condemned, if four of those who confessed 
agreed in accusing the same person ; and these two dignitaries 
used their utmost diligence to bring this opinion into effect. Du- 
bois declared publicly, that he knew things at which, if made 
known, " people would be much abashed," and that he knew 
that all who were accused were justly accused. He said that 
bishops and even cardinals had been at the Vaulderie, or sab- 
bath, and that the number of persons compromised in it was so 
great, that, if they had only some king or great prince to head 
them, they would rebel against the whole world. The bishop 
of Bayrut had held the office of penitentier to the pope, and was 
said to connaitre moult des choses ; and the historian tells us that 
he had " such an imagination," that as soon as he saw people, 
he at once judged and said whether they were Vauldois or not 
(a veritable Matthew Hopkins of the fifteenth century). This 
man and Dubois sustained, that when a man was once accused 
of this crime, from that moment nobody, even father or mother, 
or wife, or brother, or child, ought to take his part, or hold any 
communication with him. At this time, another citizen of Arras, 
a wood-merchant, was accused and thrown into prison ; and the 
count of Estampes was prevailed upon to write a letter to the 
vicars, rebuking them for their tardiness. 

At length, a scaffold was raised in the public place of the city 
of Arras, and, amid an immense concourse of people, all the 
prisoners were brought forth, each with a mitre on his head, on 
which the devil was painted in the form in which he had ap- 
peared at the Vaulderie. They were first exhorted by the in- 
quisitors, and their confession was then read to them, in which 
they avowed that when they wished to go to the Vaulderie, they 
took a certain ointment which the devil had given them, rubbed 
a little wooden rod and the palms of their hands with it, and 
then placed the rod between their legs, upon which they were 
suddenly carried through the air to the place of assembly. There 
they found tables spread, loaded with all sorts of meats and with 
wine, and a devil in the form of a goat, with the tail of an ape, 
and a human countenance. They first did oblation and homage 
to him, offering him their soul, or at least some part of their 
body, and then, as a mark of adoration, kissed him behind, hold- 
ing burning torches in their hands. The abbe de pen de sens 
was stated to have held the oflice of master of the ceremonies at 
these meetings, it being his duty to make the new-comers do 
their homage. After this, they all trod on the cross, spit upon 
it, in despitQ of Jesus and the Holy Trinity, and performed 



WITCHCRAFT AT ARRAS. 55 

other profane actions. They then fell ta eating and drinking, 
and the meeting ended in a scene of indescribable debauchery, 
in which the demon took alternately the forms of each sex. Af- 
ter a number of wicked actions, the devil preached to the assem- 
bly, and forbade them to go to church, or to hear mass, or to touch 
holy water, or perform any other Christian duty. The assembly 
was stated to have been most commonly held at a fountain in the 
wood of Mofflaines, about a league from Arras, but sometimes in 
other places, and, on some occasions, they had gone thither on foot. 

When this confession had been read, the prisoners were pub- 
licly asked if they acknowledged its truth, and they all answered 
with a clear voice, " Yes," after which they were taken from 
the scaffold, and carried to the town-hall. Their sentence was 
then published in French and Latin, and they were delivered 
over to the secular power, to do execution upon them as rotten 
and stinking members of the church of Christ. Their inheritances 
were forfeited to the count, and their goods (the better share of the 
booty in this instance) to the bishop. When it was announced to 
the prisoners that they were condemned to death, the women 
burst into fearful screams and lamentations, and they all declared 
themselves innocent, and called for vengeance on Jacques Du- 
bois, who, they said, had induced them to make the confession 
which he had put into their mouths, by the promise that on that 
condition he would save their lives. They persisted in declar- 
ing their innocence to the last, which " moved people to great 
-thought and murmurs," some asserting that they were wrongful- 
ly condemned, while others said it was the devil who had made 
them obstinate, that they might not relinquish his service. The 
abhe de peu de sens was the first that was burnt ; and his fate 
excited much commiseration, for he was between sixty and sev- 
enty years of age, a painter and a poet, who had been welcome 
every vvhere, because he composed and sung songs well ; and it 
was observed, that he had made beautiful ditties and ballads in 
honor of the blessed Virgin ; but there were people malicious 
enough to say, that when he sung these, he took off his hat at 
the end, and said in a low voice, " Ne deplaise a mon rnaistreV 
The woman Demiselle, who had been the first person accused, 
was carried to Douai to be burnt there. 

Hitherto, the accused had been all poor people, and chiefly 
persons of very equivocal character. Their depositions, as far 
as they compromised others, were kept in the greatest secresy ; 
but it was after their execution that the real designs of the prose- 
cutors began to show themselves. Late in the evening of the 16th 



56 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

of July, 1460, the governor of Peronne, Bauldwin, lord of Noy- 
alles, came to. Arras, "and arrested, on an accusation of Vaulde- 
rie. Master Anthoine Sacquespee, one of thq echeAdns of the city, 
and a very rich burgher, and delivered him into the custody of 
the lieutenant of Arras, who committed him to the bishop's prison. 
The following morning, another of the echevins, Jehan Josset, 
and the city sergeant, Henriet de Royville, both men of substance, 
were imprisoned in the course of the day ; the fear and conster- 
nation of the citizens became so great, that several of the most 
wealthy attempted to save themselves by flight ; but they were 
immediately pursued by the officers of the count of Estampes, 
and brought back to be imprisoned along with their companions. 
Some of them were followed as far as Paris ; several other per- 
sons, all chosen apparently for their wealth, were arrested in the 
course of the following days, among whom was the lord of 
BeaufFort ; and the affair made so much noise, that even in dis- 
tant parts of France, a traveller who was known to have come 
from Arras, could with difficulty find anybody who would give 
him lodgings. 

A few of the persons thus seized were set at liberty, because 
they would not confess, and only one, or two, or three witnesses 
had deposed to having seen them af the sabbath ; but the rest ac- 
cused only on the evidence forced from prostitutes and others, 
who had been put to death, and were therefore not forthcoming 
to be cross-examined or confronted with the persons they ac- 
cused, were treated with the utmost rigor. The city of Arras 
■was in the greatest consternation ; trade was at a stand ; and 
people were seizing every possible excuse to leave it. At length 
the affair reached the ears of the duke of Burgundy, and it was 
discussed before him and the learned people of his court at Brus- 
sels, and at their suggestion, the opinion of the university of 
Louvaine was taken. There was found much division of opin- 
ion, however, among the learned clerks ; for some declared loud- 
ly their belief that this crime of Vaulderie was not real, but a 
mere illusion ; while others as resolutely sustained the contrary. 
The duke, however, interposed his authority so far, that from 
this time no other persons were arrested, and he sent to Arras 
one of his confidential courtiers to watch the trials, which were 
pushed forward as rapidly as possible by Dubois and his col- 
leagues. 

On the 12th of October, 1460, the five prisoners of most im- 
portance for their wealth or position, were brought forth, and, to 
the surprise of everybody, the lord of Beauffort made a voluntary 



TPIE LORD OF BEAUFFORT. 57 

confession, that lie had been acquainted with the three prostitutes 
who had already perished at the stake, and that he had allowed 
himself to be overcome by their wicked persuasions, in conse- 
quence of which he had, in his own house, anointed a stick and 
his own body with the ointment which they had given him, and 
that he was immediately carried away to the wood of Moufflaine, 
where he found a great multitude of persons of both sexes con- 
gregated together. He said that the devil presided over the as- 
sembly in the form of an ape, and that he had done homage to 
him, and kissed one of his paws. He expressed the greatest 
contrition for his crime, and begged for mercy of his judges. 
Many' of the other prisoners sustained the utmost extremity of 
torture, and still asserted their innocence ; but the confession of 
the lord of Beauffbrt had its effect in giving credit to the accusa- 
tions of the inquisitors, who declared publicly that antichrist was 
born, and that the VauUlerie Avas preparing the way for him. 
All the prisoners were found guilty, and the sentence was con- 
firmed by the duke, but none of them were put to death. The 
lord of Beauffort was condemned to ten years' imprisonment, and 
to a heavy fine, which went chiefly to the church and to the in- 
quisitors. The others were similarly punished with various de- 
grees of fine and imprisonment. 

A new incident in this tragedy occurred at the beginning of 
the year 1461, which seemed like a judgment of Providence on 
one of the most busy persecutors of the good citizens of Arras. 
Master Jacques Dubois, dean of the church of Notre Dame, as 
he v/as on his way to the town of Corbey, was suddenly struck 
with a paralytic attack, which deprived him of his senses. He 
was carried to Paris, but medical aid was of no avail. Pie re- 
covered the use of his senses, but he remained in a state of ex- 
treme bodily weakness, his members trembled and shook when 
he attempted to use them and he lingered on miserably in his 
chamber till the month of February, when he died. All who be- 
lieved in the truth of the Vaulderie, said that he had been be- 
witched by some of the sorcerers in revenge for the activity he 
had shown in bringing them to justice. 

But it turned out that the inquisitors, in their eagerness for the 
plunder, had struck too high. The lord of Beauffort, indignant 
at the treatment he had experienced, prosecuted his judges, and 
carried his cause before the parliament of Paris, where it was 
pleaded by his counsel in June, 1461.' The latter laid open, 
with a very unsparing hand, the illegal and tyrannical conduct 
of the inquisitors ; showed that the confessions of the prisoners 



58 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

had been forced from them by the torture, and that they had been 
allowed to make no defence ; and stated, that, at the trial, the 
lord of Beauffort had himself been put to the torture, and persist- 
ing in asserting his innocence, had been carried back to prison, 
where he was Adsited by Master Jacques Dubois, the dean of 
Ndtre Dame above mentioned, who had begged him on his knees 
to make a confession and acknowledge that he had been present 
at the Vauhlcrie, pretending that he made this request for the 
sake of his children and family, as it was the only way in which 
he could save him from the stake, in which case his property and 
estates would be confiscated, and his children reduced to pover- 
ty ; that when the lord of Beauffort represented to Dubois in re- 
ply, that he was already bound by the oath he had taken to his 
own innocence, and which he could not contradict, the dean told 
him not to be uneasy on that point, as he would undertake to ob- 
tain an absolution for him. It was now remembered that when 
the first victims of the inquisitors were carried to execution, 
they had asserted that all they had said in their confessions was 
untrue, and that Jacques Dubois had promised them he would save 
their lives if they would say it. The parliament at once acquit- 
ted the lord of Beauffort and set him at liberty. The other pris- 
oners were then sent for by the parliament, and their cases hav- 
ing been severally examined into, they were also released from 
the penalties to which they had been condemned, and sent 
home to their families. Thus ended the persecution of the sor- 
cerers of Arras, an extraordinary example of the lengths to 
which people may be led by ignorance and superstition. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE LORD OF MIREBEAXT AND PIERRE d'eSTAING THE ALCHEMIST. 

At the same period with the persecution of the citizens of 
Arras for Vaulderie or sorcery, another town in France was the 
scene of events equally characteristic of an age when great 
troubles frequently arose out of what would now be considered 
the most contemptible superstitions of the vulgar. The science 
of alchemy was closely allied to that of magic ; both were 
grounded in the desire to become master of the secret and mys- 
terious workings of nature. The former especially addressed 



THE LORD OF MIREBEAU.' 59 

itself to the covetous feelings of mankind, and found dupes in 
every class of society, although old Chaucer's judgment was con- 
stantly verified in the result — 

" This cursed craft who so wol exercise, 
He shal no good have, that him may sufEce : 
For all the good he spendeth thereahoute 
He leeen shal, thereof have I no doubte." 

The history of alchemy in the middle ages would make a book 
of Itself; I will not enter upon it, but proceed to my narrative, 
which furnishes a pertinent illustration of the dictum of the old 
English poet. 

One day, at the beginning of the month of November, 1455, a 
man named Pierre d'Estaing, a practitioner in medicine, who 
stated that he was attached to the household of the duke of Bour- 
bon, arrived suddenly and hurriedly at the convent of the Jaco- 
bins in the town of Dijon, and claimed protection under the right 
of asylum which the house of this order enjoyed by especial priv- 
ilege. He refused, however, to inform them of the circum- 
stances which had placed his life in danger. He remained safe 
under shelter of the immunities of the place a few days, until on 
Friday, the 7th of November between eight and nine o'clock in 
the morning, Jean de Beauffremont, lord of Mirebeau and Bour- 
bonne, a powerful baron of the neighborhood, came to the post- 
ern-gate of the monastery, on pretence of hearing mass, accom- 
panied by two of his bastard children (one of whom was a Jaco- 
bin monk) and a*party of armed retainers. Their horses had 
been placed secretly in the stable of an adjoining inn. The in- 
truders marched direct into the cloisters, and there seized Pierre 
d'Estaing, whom they found sitting under the arcade, and, in 
spite of the cries and resistance of the monks, who had been 
brought together by the noise of these violent proceedings, 
dragged him to the outside of the convent, where they ordered 
him to mount ahorse which had been brought there in readiness. 
On his refusing to obey, the lord of Mirebeau drew his dagger* 
and struck him on the head, so as to produce an effusion of 
blood ; and after giving him several blows with the fist, they 
bound him with cords and tied him on the horse's back. The 
whole party then rode off at full gallop, succeeded in passing one 
of the gates of the town before it could be closed upon them, and 
made for the castle of Mirebeau, where their prisoner was thrown 
into the castle dungeon. 

Meanwhile the good town of Dijon was thrown into a great 
uproar. The mayor and echevins met the same day. A de- 



60 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

tailed proces-verhal was drawn up by the municipal officers, and 
witnesses were heard, who all confirmed the account giVen by 
the monks. Not only had there been a flagrant breach of 
the privileges secured to the town by its charter, which gave 
to the municipal officers the sole right of arrest within the town 
and its jurisdiction, but a convent, protected by the strongest 
sympathies of the municipality, had been openly violated. The 
monastery of the Jacobins was, indeed, under the special juris- 
diction of the mayor and echevins ; and it was within its walls 
that, for half a century, the municipal elections had always taken 
place. On the morrow Master Etienne Berbisey, lieutenant of 
the mayor, and Master Mougin Lacorne, secretary of the munici- 
pality (or, as we should saj^ town-clerk), were sent to Mirebeau, 
to demand of its lord, Jean de BaufFremont, reparation for the in- 
juries done to the privileges of Dijon ; but he made evasive an- 
swers, and evidently wished to gain time. After vain attempts, 
on the part of the town, to bring their opponent to reason by 
friendly expostulations, the authorities proceeded to act with the 
vigor that so frequently characterized the measures of the mu- 
nicipal bodies in the middle ages. On the 13th of November, 
Philippe Bergain,the sergeant and crier of the town, summoned, 
by sound of trumpet, in all the streets and places of Dijon, the 
lord Jean de Bauffremont and his accomplices, to appear before 
the mayor, on Monday, the 24th of November, at two o'clock in 
the afternoon, on pain of confiscation of all the goods he pos- 
sessed in Dijon, and of perpetual banishment from the town and 
its jurisdiction. 

The town had met with a formidable antagonist in Jean de 
Bauffremont, who quietly set the municipal authorities at defi- 
ance. He happened to possess no goods within the limits of 
their jurisdiction, so that their only hope of obtaining justice was 
by calling for the interference of their feudal lord, the duke of Bur- 
gundy, to whom, and to his house, the lord of Mirebeau had done 
important services. Jean de Bauffremont had accompanied the 
duke Jean-sans-Peur to the siege of Bourges, in 1412 ; in 1417 
he was one of the captains who besieged the castle of Nogent, 
and who received its capitulation in the name of the duke : and 
in the year ensuing, he had bravely repulsed the troops of the 
king of France, which were ravaging the frontiers of the duchy. 
In fact, he had shown himself, through these desolating civil 
wars, one of the bravest and most devoted adherents of the Bur- 
gundian party. At the first glance, therefore, the success of an 
application to the duke appeared to be very doubtful. But, amid 



THE LORD OF MIREBEAtJ. 61 

the constant troubles and hostilities of the middle ages, the lead- 
ing men in the municipal towns learned to be at once brave cap- 
tains and skilful diplomatists ; and we shall see in the sequel that 
those of Dijon were not deficient, at least in the qualifications of 
the latter. 

The duke of Burgundy was at this time in Holland, at the 
Hague, whither the mayor and echevins sent messengers with 
letters, placing themselves under his special protection. They 
made a full statement of the affair, pleaded their chartered rights 
and privileges, and ended by intimating that the reason they had 
not been on the spot in time to seize the offenders in the fact, 
and exact justice for themselves, was that they were at that mo- 
ment occupied in their assembly in voting unanimously the aid of 
sixty thousand francs, which the duke had asked of them in the 
month of January preceding. This was a very cunning stroke 
of policy, and seems to have had its efTect. To make still more 
sure, the burghers wrote at the same time to the duke's chan- 
cellor, to Jean de Molesmes, the duke's secretary, Jean Costain, 
his butler, to Jean Martin, the castellan of Rouvre and the duke's 
valet-de-chambre, and to other officers of the ducal household, 
recommending the cause of the town to their protection in the 
most pressing terms, and as there are in the municipal accounts 
of this period a number of vague and mysterious entries of pay- 
ments of money voted by the town, it seems probable that other 
means were taken to make clear to the duke's councillors the 
justice of this cause. The result was, that the duke took up the 
cause of the burghers with zeal, and issued on the 9th of Decem- 
ber a peremptory order to the bailiff of Dijon to repair immedi- 
ately to the castle of Mirebeau, to deliver the prisoner, and 
restore him to the place whence he had been taken, using 
force in case of resistance, and to arrest without delay all per- 
sons concerned in the outrage, and commit them to prison in the 
strong castle of Talant, belonging to the duke, and situated in the 
immediate vicinity of Dijon. On the 31st of December the bai- 
liff of Dijon, Philippe de Courcelles, went to Mirebeau with a 
strong party of sergeants and men-at-arms, but he found the gates 
of the castle closed and barricaded. After he had knocked three 
times at the principal entrance, and summoned the castle by 
sound of horn at the end of the drawbridge, the chief of the 
watch, who is called the bastard Jean de Ruppes, made his ap- 
pearance ; but the only answer he would give was, that his mas- 
ter was absent, and that he had left strict orders to open to no- 
body. The bailiff then read the duke's order, but in vain ; where- 



62 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

upon lie pronounced solemnly the confiscation of the castle ^f 
Mirebeau, and in sign of seizure placed the ducal arms on the 
great gate. He then collected together the people of the town 
of Mirebeau by sound of trumpet, and caused the crier, as well 
before the castle as in the market-place, to summon the lord 
Jean de BaufFremont, and his accomplices, and the bastard Jean 
de Ruppes, to appear before him on the 10th of January follow- 
ing, on pain of banishment and final confiscation of the goods of 
all the persons thus summoned. Philippe de Courcelles then 
returned with his escort to Dijon. 

The affair had now taken a very serious turn. Jean de Bauf- 
fremont imagined that it would end in a mere squabble between 
himself and the townsmen, or he would hardly have carried the 
matter so far ; but when he saw the promptitude with which the 
duke had taken up the cause of the town, he was not so rash as 
to brave an authority against which he knew that he was power- 
less. Accordingly, when the 10th of January arrived, he came 
forward and surrendered himself a prisoner in the castle of Ta- 
lant. The prosecution was now actively followed up as well by 
the duke's bailiff as in the municipal court. When brought into 
the court for examination, the lord of Mirebeau confessed the 
crime with which he was charged ; but he refused, with the same 
obstinacy which had been shown by Pierre d'Estaing himself, to 
give any account of the motives of his hostility to that individ- 
ual. The bailiff adjourned his judgment from day to day, in the 
expectation of further disclosures. The municipal body held a 
rapid series of deliberations, all of which were entered in their 
secret register, and the result of which was regularly communi- 
cated to the duke and his counsellors, in a correspondence which 
was carried on, without interruption, during the months of Jan- 
uary, February, and March. The men-at-arms of the town were 
in the meantime actively engaged in tracing the accomplices of 
Jean de BaufFremont, who had hitherto effectively concealed them- 
selves ; but they were at length discovered, and were all arrested 
on the 11th of March, and the same day confronted with their 
master. The latter now made a full confession of his dealings 
with Pierre d'Estaing. 

It appears that some months before the proceedings described 
above, a certain Jacobin monk, named Olivier, came to the lord of 
Mirebeau, and told him, that among other things there was a man at 
Moulins, in the Bourbonnois, who had an art (a ligue, as he termed 
it — pei'haps with the evil one) whereby he could make forty or fifty 
thousand ecus every year, and that he was called Master Pierre 



THE LORD OF MIREBEAU. 63 

d'Estaing, a gentleman by birth, and, as lie said, a near kinsman 
of the pope. Seeing that he had raised the curiosity of the lord 
of Mirebeau, he added that, if it were his pleasure, he would 
undertake to act as a negotiator for him with the said Pierre 
d'Estaing. The cupidity of Jean de Bauffremont was strongly- 
excited and he eagerly embraced the monk's ofler ; and Brother 
Olivier made several journeys to Moulins at his expense, to con- 
vey his proposals to the alchemist. Led by the favorable reports 
which this monk brought him, Jean de Bauffremont repaired to 
Moulins in person, and there conversed with Master Pierre, and 
was so fully satisfied with his statements, that he entered into an 
agreement whereby Pierre d'Estaing promised to put him in pos- 
session of the science of his " ligup.,^'' on condition that the lord 
of Mirebeau should deposile in the hands of a merchant the sum 
of one thousand ecus of gold, which were to be given to Mas- 
ter PieiTe as soon as he had fulfilled his promise. The next day 
the lord of Mirebeau was so much pleased with the " fair and 
great promises" of the alchemist, that he gave him a diamond of 
the value of twenty ecus or more, to present to his lady ; which 
so entirely gained his heart, that he immediately agreed to re- 
duce his demand from a thousand to five hundred ecus, and Jean 
de Bauffremont took immediate steps to raise the money. From 
this time we hear no more of Brother Olivier ; and it looks much 
as if the two parties chiefly concerned were trying mutually to 
overreach each other. 

Before Jean de Bauffremont departed from Moulins, Pierre 
d'Estaing gave him one of his servants to accompany him back 
to Mirebeau, there to commence operations, which he said would 
take three months before it would be necessary for him to inter- 
fere. He was then to bring the preparation to Moulins, and to 
pay two hundred ecus into the hands of the alchemist, upon 
which the latter would enter upon the more secret parts of the 
process, which his servant was incapable of performing. 

Jean de Bauffremont accordingly returned to his castle of Mire- 
beau with Pierre d'Estaing's servant, to whom he gave money to 
defray his expenses. At Mirebeau, the servant began to work 
assiduously on his " operations," in the course of which he was 
sent several times to consult his master, always at Jean de Bauf- 
fremont's expense, who also gave him daily a Rhenish florin for 
his wages. In the sequel Pierre d'Estaing himself came to 
Mirebeau, and renewed his promises to its lord, who in return, 
assured him that he "should be liberally rewarded. Master 
Pierre, with three assistants, had remained in the castle a con- 



64 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

siderable time, at Jean de Bauffremont's expense, when the lat- 
ter received a letter from the count of Clermont, son of the duke 
of Bourbon and Auvergne, to whose house the alchemist had 
been attached. The count congratulated the lord of Mirebeau 
on the acquisition he had made in the person of Master Pierre 
d'Estaing, who, he said, was quite capable of performing what 
he had promised, adding, that he would not have permitted him 
to leave his service for that of any other person ; he recommend- 
ed him to keep a sharp watch on the alchemist, and if he did 
not perform his work to his satisfaction, to shut him up in a place 
where he could work only by candle-light, and to keep him there 
till it was done ; and concluded by expressing a hope that Jean, 
de Bauffremont would not object to share with him the great 
treasure which he was to gain by the labors of Master Pierre. 

Jean de Bauffremont immediately showed the count's letter to 
Pierre d'Estaing, who was much abashed when he heard its con- 
tents, and bursting into tears, fell on his knees before him, and 
begged that he would have pity upon him. Jean de Baiiffremont 
told him to lay aside his fears, assured him that no one should injure 
him, and promised to treat him as he would his own child. It ap- 
pears, however, that he led him into the chapel of the castle, and 
made him swear, with his hand upon the altar, that he would not 
go beyond the castle walls until he had entirely completed his 
task. Upon this Pierre d'Estaing obtained from his employer a 
hundred and fifty francs to give to his first servant, a horse worth 
twelve ecus, and a mantle of four ecus ; six ecus to distribute 
among his other servants ; twenty ecus to send to his house at 
Moulins ; and ten ecus to send to his " chambriere" (we are not 
told if this were the lady for whom the diamond was designed). 
It is probable that the alchemist was now treated with rigor, and 
that he considered his life in danger ; for these last transactions 
occurred about the feast of All Saints, two or three days after 
which, while Jean de Bauffremont was absent on a visit to Vil- 
lers-les-Pots, he let himself down from one of the castle win 
dows by means of his bed-clothes, about eleven o'clock at night, 
passed the outer watch of the castle unperceived, and, wander- 
ing till morning, reached the town of Dijon, where, as we have 
already seen, he sought shelter in the convent of the Jacobins. 

Jean de Bauffremont was immediately made acquainted with 
Master Pierre's escape, and he hurried back in a fury to Mire- 
beau, where the hiding-place of the fugitive was soon known. 
According to his ov/n account of what followed, the lord of Mire- 
beau repaired with a party of his friends and servants to Dijon, 



THE LORD OF MIREBEAU. 65 

and there gave information that a prisoner had escaped from his 
castle, and was concealed by the Jacobins. The next day he 
went to the monastery, had an interview with Pierre d'Estaing, 
and, as he stated, obtained from him a promise to retm-n with him 
to his castle and continue his alchemical operations, which seems 
to have been the thing he had most at heart. Finding subse- 
quently that Master Pierre was still unwilling to leave the sanc- 
tuary, he represented to him the great expenses he had already 
been at, and offered to pay for him into the hands of some person 
in Dijon a thousand ecus as the reward for the completion of his 
work, pledging himself that when it was finished, he would bring 
him back in safety and restore him to the same place in which 
he had now taken refuge. The alchemist seems now, however, 
to have had no inclination to renew his experiments ; perhaps 
he had no great confidence in their success, and Jean de Bauffre- 
mont, finding that he wonld no longer put any trust in his prom- 
ises, told him openly that from that moment he considered all 
their engagements broken, and that each must do his best for 
himself. He then concerted measures for taking away the fugi- 
tive by force, which, as we have already seen, were carried into 
effect early on the following morning. 

The legal investigation of this strange affair being brought to 
a close by the confession of the principal offender, the mayor and 
echevins demanded, in the name of the crown, that Jean de Bauf- 
fremont should pay a fine of ten thousand ecus of gold, to be em- 
ployed on the fortification of the town wall, and that his accom- 
plices should be given up to the judgment of the municipal court. 
The latter point was yielded at once, without any hesitation, and 
on the 18th of March the court pronounced its sentence, accord- 
ing to which the men who had aided the lord of Mirebeau in vio- 
lating the sanctuary of the convent, were to be brought on a 
Sunday, in their shirts and barefoot, each with a lighted taper in 
his hand weighing three pounds, before the same gate of the 
tovv^n through which Pierre d'Estaing had been carried away, 
and there they were to cry " mercy" on their knees before the 
mayor and echevins, who were to be summoned for the occasion, 
and they were also to cry " mercy" to the whole town, at the same 
time making a public confession of their crime ; they were then 
to recite the amende honorable, after which each was to have one 
of his hands cut off; they were next to carry the tapers to the 
monastery of the Jacobins, and there offer them at the high altar ; 
after which they were to pay a pecuniary fine proportionate to 
their means, and to be banished from the town and jurisdiction 

6* 



66 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

of Dijon for ever. This sentence was executed to the letter on 
the first Sunday in April. 

It appears to have been a much more difficult matter to pro- 
nounce judgment on the person of Jean de Bauffremont, w^ho re- 
mained in prison till the month of December following, without 
any prospect of a satisfactory decision of his cause. He then 
wrote to the mayor to propose terms of arrangement, and sent 
the letter by one of the duke's councillors ; but when the com- 
mon council of the town had held two deliberations on the sub- 
ject, he only received for answer that, since the cause was now 
in the duke's court, and before his bailiff, it was not in the power 
of the municipal body to enter upon his proposals. Jean de 
Bauffremont then wrote direct to the duke of Burgundy, begging 
in the most abject terms, that the duke would have compassion 
upon him. Three months again passed away ; but at length, on 
the 26th of March, 1457, Duke Philippe, then at Brussels, granted 
the prisoner letters of pardon and restitution to his goods, on 
condition that he should give sureties for making his peace with 
the town. 

This, however, was not so easily done. A new series of pro- 
ceedings was commenced, in the course of which the lord of 
Mirebeau died. They still remain imdecided in the year 1462, 
when the cause was again prosecuted against Jean de Bauftre- 
mont's widow. Marguerite de Chalon, and his son, Pierre de 
Bauffremont, and, by the duke's orders, the affair was carried be- 
fore the parliament of Burgundy, then sitting at Beaune. This 
new process lasted till 1470, in which year, on the 12th of Jan- 
uary, the parliament condemned the heirs of Jean de Bauffremont 
to a fine of four thousand livres to the town, which was subse- 
quently, by an agreement of the two parties, commuted for one 
thousand livres. It was not till the 6th of August, 1472, that the 
judgment of the parliament was executed, and that this long af- 
fair, which had been held in suspense during more than fifteen 
years, was fully terminated.* 

* The documents of this i-emarkable story are published in an article in the " Bib- 
liotheque de I'Ecole des Cbartes." 



THE ENCHANTER VIRGIL. 67 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE EARLIER MEDIEVAL TYPE OF THE SORCERER ; VIRGIL THE 
ENCHANTER. 

We have hitherto been obliged to form our notion of the prac- 
tice of sorcery and magic in the middle ages from individual and 
scattered examples of superstitious practices. But it was a pe- 
culiar trait in the character of the middle ages to create imagin- 
ary personages, and clothe them with the attributes of a class — 
types, as it were, of popular belief or of popular attachment or 
glory. Such, in that age, to history and to sentiment, were the 
heroes and heroines of its romances. Romance, indeed, was 
then but a sort of reflection of the popular mind. The despised 
and hated witch has left us no such type of her life and history ; 
but the magician or sorcerer held a higher rank in public esti- 
mation. From a feeling which may be traced back to Runic 
ages, when every letter of the alphabet was supposed to possess 
its mystic power as an instrument of magic, his vocation was 
looked upon with more reverence as closely connected with lite- 
rature and science. 

Either from this circumstance, or because their names were 
popularly attached to some of the marvellous remains of ancient 
art, the people of the middle ages first saw the type of the magi- 
cian in the poets and philosophers of classic days. The physi- 
cian Hippocrates, under the corrupted name of Ypocras, was 
supposed to have effected his cures by magic, and he was the 
subject of a legendary history, certainly as old as the end of the 
twelfth century, containing incidents which were subsequently 
told of a more celebrated conjuror, Virgil. In the popular creed 
of the middle ages, medicine was also closely allied with witch- 
craft and the forbidden sciences ; many of the herbs and other 
articles which restored the patient to health had qualities of a 
more mysterious nature, and the philter or the more fearful mix- 
ture of the sorcerei-'s caldron, which had the power of com- 
manding the spirit of darkness, were but an extension of the 
physician's specific. We shall have occasion to recur again to 
this subject, and show how far a knowledge of the medical prop- 
erties of herbs and other things did form a part of medieval sor- 



68 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

eery, and was used for deadly purposes. It is not impossible 
that the equivocal meaning of the Latin word carmen (which 
means a poem and a charm) may have contributed to the popular 
reputation of the poets. Down to a very recent period, if not at 
the present day, the people in the neighborhood of Palestrina 
have looked upon Horace as a powerful and benevolent wizard. 
A story, apparently not more modern than the thirteenth century, 
represents two scholars proceeding to the tomb of Ovid, and re- 
ceiving answers from his manes ; in fact, practising necromancy. 
But the personage^ of antiquity about whom these mysterious 
legends were principally grouped was the poet Virgil. It would 
perhaps not be very difficult to point out some reasons for which 
such tales were attached to the memory of one who seems to 
have found a place in popular superstition from a very early pe- 
riod, and whose name was connected in popular tradition Avith 
several ancient monuments in Italy. 

We find scattered allusions" to the supposed exploits of Virgil 
at an early period, connected chiefly with Naples and Rome. 
Gervase of Tilbury, a well-known writer of the end of the 
twelfth century, heard, while in Italy, how Virgil had placed a 
brazen fly on one of the gates of the former city, which kept the 
city free from real flies ; how he had erected chambers in which 
meat could be kept for any length of time without tainting ; and 
how he had placed two images of stone at another gate of Na- 
ples, which severally he endowed with the quality of giving 
good fortune or bad fortune to strangers who, entering the city, 
approached by the one or the other. According to this vi^riter, 
he raised on a mountain near Naples a statue of brass, which 
had in its mouth a trumpet, and when the north wind blew, this 
trumpet sounded so loud, that the fire and smoke issuing out of 
those forges of Vulcan, which are at this day seen near the city 
of Puossola (Puzzuola), were forced back toward the sea, so as 
not to injure or annoy the inhabitants. He made three baths ca- 
pable of removing every disorder, with inscriptions in letters of 
gold ; but the latter were cunningly defaced by the physicians of 
Salerno, who were jealous lest people should be cured of their 
diseases without their intervention. He also made a contrivance 
by which no man could be hurt in the miraculous vault cut 
through the mountain at Posilippo in going to Naples. He 
further made a public fire, where every one might warm himself, 
near which he placed a brazen archer, with his bow and arrow 
drawn ready to shoot, and an inscription, stating, "If any one 
strike me, I will shoot off my arrow." At length a fool-hardy 



VIRGIL INITIATED IN MAGIC. G9 

individual struck the archer, who shot him with the arrow, and 
sent him into the fire, which was immediately extinguished. 
Other writers added to this list of Virgil's wonders. But there 
seems to have been a more explicit and connected story of 
the enchanter Virgil, from what period it is difficult to say, 
which appeared in a French history in the fifteenth century, 
and was printed at the close of that century and the beginning 
of the sixteenth. Two editions are known, and it has been re- 
printed. About the same time, " the Life of Virgilius" appeared 
in English, printed at Antwerp by John Doesborcke, about the 
year 1508. The English story does not appear to have been 
taken directly from the French, at least not from the printed edi- 
tion, from which it differs considerably in some of its details and 
in its extent. It gives us the full outline of the medieval belief 
in Virgil the magician. 

Vii'gil, according to this story was the son of a Roman sena- 
tor of great wealth and power, who was at war with the emperor 
of Rome. Virgil's birth was attended with prodigies, and he 
soon showed so much aptitude for learning, that he was sent to 
school at Toledo. Toledo, as I have already observed, was a 
celebrated school of magic in the middle ages ; but the way in 
which Virgil obtained his knowledge was sufficiently singular to 
deserve being repeated in the quaint language of the original. 
" And Virgilius," we are told, " was at scole at Tolenten, where 
he stodyed dyligently, for he was of great understandynge. 
Upon a tyme the scholers hadde lycence to goo to play and sporte 
them in the fyldes after the usaunce of the olde tyme ; and there 
was also Virgilius thereby also walkynge among the hylles all 
about. It fortuned he spyed a great hole in the syde of a great 
hyll, wherein he went so depe that he culde not see no more lyght, 
and than he went a lytell ferther therein, and than he sawe som 
lyght agayne, and than wente he fourth streyghte. And within 
a lytyll wyle after he harde a voice that called, ' Virgilius, Vir- 
gilius !' and he loked aboute, and he colde nat see nobodye. 
Than Virgilius spake, and asked, ' Who calleth me V Than 
harde he the voyce agayne, but he sawe nobody. Than sayd he, 
' Virgilius, see ye not that lytyll bourde lyinge bysyde you there 
marked with that worde V Than answered Virgilius, ' I see that 
borde well enough.' The voyce sayd, ' Doo awaye that bourd, 
and lette me oute theratte.' Than answered Virgilius to the 
voyce that was under the lytell borde, and sayd, ' Who art thow 
that talkest me so V Than answered the devyll, ' I am a devyll 
conjured out of the body of a certeyne man, and banysshed here 



70 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

tyll the day of jugement, without that I be delyvered by the 
handes of men. Thus, Virgilius, I pray the delyver me out of 
this payn, and I shall shewe unto the many bokes of nygro- 
mancy, and howe thow shalt cum by it lyghtly and knowe the 
practyse therein, that no man in the scyence of negromancye 
shall pass the ; and, moreover, I shall showe and enforme you 
so that thou shalt have all thy desyre, v\^herby me thynke it is a 
great gyfte for so lytyll a doynge, for ye may also thus your poor 
frendys helpen, and make ryghte your ennemyes unmyghty.' 
Thorowgh that great promyse vi^as Virgilius tempted ; he badde 
the fynd showe the bokes to hym, that he myght have and occu- 
py them at his wyll. And so the fynd shewed hym, and than 
Virgilius pulled open a bourde, and there was a lytell hole, and 
thereat wrange the devyll out lyke a yeel [an eel], and cam and 
stode byfore Virgilius lyke a bygge man. Thereof Virgilius was 
astoned [astonished] and merveyled greatly thereof, that so great 
a man myght come out at so lytell a hole. Than sayd Virgilius, 
' Shulde ye well passe into the hole that ye cam out of?' — ' Ye, 
I shall well,' sayd the devyll. ' I holde the beste pledge that I 
have, ye shall not do it.' ' Well,' sayde the devyll, ' thereto I 
consente.' And than the devyll wrange hymselfe into the lytell 
hole agen, and as he was therein, Virgilius kyvered the hole 
ageyn, with the bourd close, and so was the devyll begyled, and 
myght not there come out agen, but there abydeth shytte [shut] 
styll therein. Than called the devyll dredefuUy to Virgilius, and 
sayd, ' What have ye done V Virgilius answered, ' Abyde there 
. styll to your day apoynted.' And fro thensforth abydeth he 
there. And so Virgilius becam very connynge in the practyse 
of the blacke. scyence." 

While Virgil was thus pursuing such studies, his father died, 
and the other senators joined in usurping his inheritance, on the 
principle that the smaller number of persons being in power, the 
greater would be the power of each individual. Virgil's mother 
next became aged, and she sent for her son from Toledo to pro- 
tect her, and reclaim his property and rank. Virgil collected 
the riches he had gained by his science, and repaired to Rome, 
and was received well by his " poor kinsmen," as they had no 
interest contrary to his own ; but the rich leagued with his ene- 
mies, and would not acknowledge him. Then he went before 
the emperor, stated his case, and demanded his rights. The 
emperor hesitated, and listened to evil counsellors, who said, 
" Methinketh that the land is well divided to them that have it, 
for they may help you in their need ; what needeth you for to 



VIRGIL DECEIVED BY A LADY. 71 

care for the disheriting of one schoohuaster ? bid him take heed 
and look to his schools, for he hath no right to any land here 
about the city of Rome." And so the emperor put him off for 
four or five years. 

But Virgil, aware of his own powers, was determined not to 
be thus deluded. He waited quietly till harvest, conciliating 
his poor kinsmen and friends by his liberality, and then, when 
corn and fruit were ripe, he threw, by art-magic, a mist over all 
the lands of his inheritance, so that their new possessors could 
not approach them, and so quietly gathered in the whole prod- 
uce. " And when Virgil's enemies saw the fruit so gathered, 
they assembled a great power, and came toward Virgilius to 
take him and smite off his head ; and when they were assem- 
bled, they were so strong that the emperor for fear fled out of 
Rome, for they were twelve senators that had all the world un- 
der them ; and if Virgilius had had right, he had been one of 
the twelve, but they had disinherited him and his mother. And 
when Virgilius knew of their coming, he closed all his lands 
with the air round about all his land, that no living creature 
might there come in to dwell against his [Virgil's] will or pleas- 
ure." 

This dispute led to still more important events. The empe- 
ror took part with the senators, and they all joined in making 
war upon Virgil, who not only found safety in his enchantments, 
but he at length compelled the emperor to restore him to his 
rights. From this moment Virgil became the emperor's greatest 
friend, and was the foremost in all his counsels. 

" After that it happened that Virgilius was enamored of a fair 
lady, the fairest in all Rome. Virgilius made a craft in necro- 
mancy that told her all his mind ; when the lady knew his mind, 
she thought in herself to deceive him, and said, If he will come 
at midnight to the castle wall, she should let down a basket with 
strong cords, and there to draw him up at her window, and so 
lie by her and have his pleasure ; and with this answer was 
Virgilius very glad, and said he should do it with a good will." 
It appears that the tower in which the lady dwelt was one of the 
most public places in Rome, immediately looking over the mar- 
ket, and that it was there that malefactors were exhibited to pub- 
lic view. Virgil went in the night, found the basket, jumped 
into it, and was rejoiced at finding himself pulled up with no 
hesitating hand. But when the basket was half way up the 
tower, the lady, who had no intention of yielding to his seduc- 
tions, left it, and Virgil remained in this disgraceful posture to 



72 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

be gazed at and ridiculed by the multitude during the whole of 
the following day, until the emperor himself interfered, at whose 
request the enchanter was released from his penance. 

Virgil hastened home, breathing nothing but vengeance. He 
began by extinguishing all the fire in Rome except his own. 
The Romans soon found the inconvenience of this measure, and 
made their complaint to the emperor, who went to seek assist- 
ance of Virgil. The latter at once told him that, if he wished 
for relief, he must cause the lady to be brought out in a state of 
nudity and placed in' a public part of the city, and that every 
Roman who wanted fire must go and light his candle or torch 
on her person in a manner which hardly admits of detailed de- 
scription. She was exposed in this manner during three days, 
" and after the third day went the gentlewoman home sore 
ashamed, for 'she knew well that Virgilius had done that vio- 
lence to her."* 

Virgil now married, and after his marriage he built by his 
magic art a palace for the emperor, with four corners, answer- 
ing to the four quarters of Rome ; and when the emperor placed 
himself in any one of these corners, he heard all that was said 
in the corresponding quarter of the city, so that no secret could 
be kept from him. Thus was the state protected against do- 
mestic enemies ; but it was requisite also to guard against out- 
ward foes. And one day " the emperor asked of Virgilius how 
that he might make Rome prosper and have many lands under 
them, and know when any land would rise against them ; and 
Virgilius said to the emperor, ' I will, within short space, that 
do.' And he made upon the capitolium, that was the town- 
house, carved images of stone, and that he let call salvatio 
Romce, that is to say, the salvation of the city of Rome. And 
he made in the compass all the gods that we call mawmets and 
idols, that were under the subjection of Rome ; and each of the 
gods that were there had in his hand a bell, and in the middle 
of the gods he made one god of Rome. And whensoever that 
there was any land that would make any war against Rome, 
then would the gods turn their backs toward the god of Rome ; 
and then the god of the land that would stand up against Rome 

* This was the most popular of the legends relating to the magician Virgil, and 
is frequently alluded to in old writings. The story itself is generally told with 
coarse details, better suited to those times than to the present. The reader may 
be referred, for an example, to the account of this legend given in the Pastime of 
Pleasure of Stephen Hawes (see the edition published by the Percy Society, page 
139). This story was told of Hippocrates, or Ypocras, before it was fathered upon 
Virgil. 



DESTRUCTION OF SALVATIO ROM^. 73 

clinked his bell so long that he had in his hand, till the senators 
of Rome heard it, and forthwith they went there and saw what 
land it was that would war against them, and so they prepared 
them, and went against them, and subdued them." 

This also was one of the most popular of the legends relating 
to Virgil'the necromancer ; and we can easily imagine how vul- 
gar credulity invented such a belief to explain the remains of 
Roman statuary which were still visible in the middle ages. The 
destruction of the salvatio RomcB was not less singular than its 
origin. 

" This foresaid token knew the men of Carthage, that were 
sore aggrieved for the great harm that the Romans had done 
them. And they took a privy counsel in what manner they 
might destroy that work. Then thought they in their mind to 
send three men out, and gave them great multitude of gold and 
silver ; and these three men took their leave of the lordes, and 
went towards the city of Rome, and when they were come to 
Rome, they reported themselves soothsayers and true dreamers. 
Upon a time went these three men to a hill that was within the 
city, and there they buried a great pot of money very deep in the 
earth, and when that was done and covered again, they went to 
the bridge of Tiber, an^ let fall in a certain place a 'great barrel 
with golden pence.* And when this was done, those three men 
went to the senators of Rome, and said, ' Worshipful lords, we 
have this night dreamed, that within the foot of a hill here with- 
in Rome is a great pot with money ; Avill ye, lords, grant it to 
us, and we shall do the cost to seek thereafter V And the lords 
consented ; and they took laborers, and delved the money out 
of the earth. And when it v/as done, they went another time to 
the lords, and said, ' Worshipful lords, we have also dreamed 
that in a certain place of Tiber lieth a barrel full of golden 
pence, if that you will grant to us that, we shall go seek it.' And 
the lords of Rome, thinking no deceit, granted to those sooth- 
sayers, and bade them do what they should to do their best. 
And then the soothsayers were glad ; and they hired ships, and 
men, and went towards the place where it was, and when they 
were come there, they sought in every place there about, and at 
the last found the barrel full of golden pence, whereof they 
were right glad. And then they gave to the lords costly gifts. 

* We can not help -seeing how naturally legejids like this arose out of the fre- 
quent discoveries of the concealed treasures of ancient times, and the constant re- 
covery of antiquities from such rivers as the Tiber. The English antiquary will 
understand this perfectly well. The Thames has always been rich in the produce 
Which would give rise to such stories. 

7 



74 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

And then, to come to their purpose, they came to the lords again, 
and said to them, ' Worshipful lords, we have dreamed again 
that imder the foundation of capitolium,- there where salvatio 
Ro7n(B standeth, be twelve barrels full of gold ; and pleaseth you, 
lords, that you would grant us the licence, it shall be to your 
great advantage.' And the lords, stirred with covetousness, 
granted them, because two times afore they told true ; whereof 
they were glad, and got laborers, and began to dig under the 
foundation of salvatio Romm ; and when they thought they had 
digged enough, they departed from Rome, and the next day fol- 
lowing fell that house down, and all the work that Virgilius had 
made. And so the lords knew that they were deceived, and 
were sorrowful, and after that had no fortune as they had afore- 
times."* 

After having contrived this defence against the outward 
enemies of Rome, Virgil was desired by the emperor to invent 
some method of clearing the city of the numerous banditti who 
infested it by night, and who robbed and murdered great num- 
bers of its inhabitants. He accordingly made images of cop- 
per, and the emperor having issued a decree that no honest 
people should appear out of their houses after a certain hour at 
night, these images swept through the ci*y, destroying every liv- 
ing being that was found in the streets. After an attempt to 
evade these perilous enemies, the robbers were all killed or 
driven away. We can easily understand how the popular ima- 
gination foi-raed legends like this on the sculptures of bronze and 
other material that must have been frequently discovered among 
the ruins of ancient Rome. Virgil's next performance was a 
sort of prototype of the electric light. " For profit of the com- 
mon people, Virgilius, on a great mighty marble pillar, did make 
a bridge that came up to the palace, and so went Virgilius well 
up the pillar out of the palace. That palace and the pillar stood 
in the middle of Rome ; and upon this pillar made he a lamp of 
glass that alway burned without going out, and nobody might put 
it out; and this lamp lightened over all the city of Rome from 
the one corner to the other, and there was not so little a street 
but it gave such a light that it seemed two torches there had 
stand. And upon the walls of the palace made he a metal man 
that held in his hand a metal bow that pointed ever upon the 
lamp to shoot it out ; but alway burned the lamp and gave light 

* This was one of the most popular of the earZy leg'ends relating to Virgil. It is 
found in the early collection of stories entitled the Seven Sages, and frequently 
elsewhere. 



VIRGIL AND THE SULTAN'S DAUGHTER. . 75 

over all Rome. And upon a time went the burgesses' daugliters 
to play in the palace, and they beheld the metal man, and one 
of them asked in sport, why he shot not ; and then she came to the 
man, and with her hand touched the bow, and then the bolt [ar- 
row] flew out and brake the lamp that Virgilius made. And it was 
wonder that the maiden went not out of her mind for the great 
fear she had, and also the other burgesses' daughters that were 
in her company, of the great stroke that it gave when it hit the 
lamp, and when they saw the metal man so swiftly run his way, 
and never after was he no more seen. And this foresaid lamp 
was abyding burning after the death of Virgilius by the space of 
three hundred years or more." 

After this, Virgil made himself a wonderful orchard or garden, 
and placed in it an extraordinary fountain, with a cellar or vault 
in which to store up his great wealth. " And he set two metal 
men before the door to keep it, and in each hand a great ham^* 
mer, and therewith they smote upon an anvil, one after the other, 
insomuch that the birds that fly over heareth it, and by-and-by 
falleth there down dead ; and otherwise had Virgilius not his 
good [that is, wealth] kept." Another image made by Vir- 
gil produced effects which were by no means agreeable to the 
Roman ladies, in consequence of which his wife went secretly 
and overthrew it ; and when he discovered this, " from thence- 
forth began Virgilius to hate his wife." 

The next of Virgil's exploits appears to have been taken from 
some one of the old Spanish romances. Virgil had heard people 
speak often of the beauty of the sultan's daughter, and he deter- 
mined to possess her. By his " cunning" he made a bridge in 
the air, by which he passed over in an instant to the sultan's pal- 
ace in Babylon. There he introduced himself into the chamber 
of the princess, and overcame her scruples without much diffi- 
culty, although " she never saw him before." At length he pre- 
vailed upon her to accompany him in his return, and he carried 
her through the air to his orchard, in Italy, and there he kept her 
as long as he liked, and afterward replaced her in her bed in her 
father's palace. The sultan meanwhile missed his daughter, and 
in his distress he had caused diligent search to be made for her, 
but without success, when he was informed that she was asleep 
in her bed. He was overjoyed at her recovery, and examined 
her closely as to the cause and manner of her disappearance, 
and she confessed the whole, but she neither knew who had car- 
ried her away, or whither she was taken. It was not long, how- 
ever, before Virgil came to seek her again, and then, by her 



76 SORCERY AND MAfJIC. 

father's directions, the princess took home with her some of the 
fruit which her loA^er had given her to eat, from which the sul- 
tan concluded that she had been carried to some place " on the 
side of France." After she had been frequently carried away in 
this manner, the sultan, under pretence that he wished to ascer- 
tain whence her lover came, persuaded the princess to give him 
a sleeping-draught, and thus was the intruder captured, and thrown 
into prison ; and it was judged that both he and his mistress 
should be burnt for their misdeeds. " When Virgilius heard of 
this, he made with his cunning the sultan and all his lords think 
that the great river of Babylon* was run in the middle of 
them, and that they swam and lay and sprung like ducks, and 
thus took Virgilius with him the fair lady upon the bridge in the 
air. And when they were both upon the bridge, he delivered 
the sultan from the river, and all the lords, and then they saw. 
Wirgilius carry away his daughter over the sea upon a bridge in 
the air, whereof he marvelled and was very sorry, and wist not 
what to do, for he could not remedy it. And in this manner did 
he convey the sultan's daughter over the sea to Rome. And Vir- 
gilius was sore enamored of that lady. Then he thoughit in his 
mind how he might marry her, and thought in his mind to found 
in the midst of the sea a fair town with great lands belonging to 
it ; and so he did by his cunning, and called it Naples ; and the 
foundation of it was of eggs.f And in that town of Naples he 
made a tower with four corners, and on the top he set an apple 
upon an iron yard [rod], and no man could pull away that apple 
without he brake it ; and through that iron set he a bottle, and on 
that bottle set he an egg ; and he hanged the apple by the stalk 
upon a chain, and so hangeth it still. And when the egg stir- 
reth, so should the town of Naples quake ; and when the egg 
brake, then should the town sink. When he had made an end, 
he let call it Naples. And in this tov/n he laid a part of his 
treasure that he had therein ; and also set therein his lover, the 
fair lady the sultan's daughter ; and he gave to her the town of 
Naples, and all the lands thereto belonging, to her use and her 
children." 

With such a dower, it is not to be wondered if the lady soon 

* The Nile. The Babylon in which the sultans dw^elt was old Cairo, Babylon 
of Egypt. 

t The foundation of the city of Naples upon eggB, and the egg on which its fate 
depended, seem to have been legends generally current in the middle ages. They 
are said still to exist among the lazzaroni. By the statutes of the order of the saint 
Esprit au droit desir, instituted in 1352 (Montfaucon, Monumens de la Mon. Fr., vol. 
ii., p. 329), a chapter of the knights was appointed to be held annually in custello 
ovi incantati in mirabili periculo. 



VIRGIL'S SERPENT. 77 

found a husband, and accordingly Virgil gave her in marriage to 
a certain lord of Spain, whose courage was put to the trial in de- 
fending the town against the emperor, who had " a great fantasy" 
to it, and had brought a powerful army to seize upon it by force. 
But Virgil defeated him with his enchantments, and when he 
had secured the place and driven the emperor away, " then re- 
turned he again to Rome, and fetched his books and other re- 
moveable goods, and brought them to Naples, and let his good 
alone that he had shut in the cellar, and his dwelling he gave to 
his friends to keep, and his dwelling-places, and- so departed to 
Naples. There he made a school, and gave thereto much lands, 
that every scholar abiding and going to school had land to live 
on of the town, and they that gave up the school lost the land. 
And there came many from Toledo to school. And when he 
had ordained the town well with scholars, then made he a warm 
bath, that every man might bathe him in that would ; and that 
bath is there to this time, and it was the first bath that ever was. 
And after this he made a bridge, the fairest that ever man saw, 
and there might men see all manner of fair ships that belonged 
to merchandise, and all other things of the sea. And the town 
in those days was the fairest and noblest in all the world. And 
in this school aforesaid did Virgilius read [that is, lecture upon] 
the great cunning and science of necromancy, for he was the 
cunningest that ever was afore or after in that science. And 
within short space his wife died, and she had never no children 
by him. And moreover, above all men he loved scholars, and 
gave much money to buy books withal." 

Virgil seems now to have been reconciled with the emperor, 
for he made for him a serpent of metal, to which he gave such a 
quality that any one who put his hand in its mouth and swore 
falsely would have it bitten off; but if he swore the truth, he 
would withdraw it uninjured. At last a woman accused of adul- 
tery deceived Virgil and his serpent by an artful trick, which is 
found repeated in Tristan and some others of the medieval ro- 
mances. She arranged that her lover should be there disguised 
as a fool, and then, boldly thrusting her hand into the serpent's 
mouth, she swore that she had no more sinned with the man 
who was accused of being her paramour than with that fool. 
Virgil, in anger against womankind, broke the serpent to pieces. 

Virgil's death was quite as extraordinary as his life. " And 
after this made Virgilius a goodly castle, that had but one going 
in thereto, and no man might not enter in thereto but at the one 

1^* 



78 SOKOERY AND MAGIC. 

o-ate, or else not. And also about the same castle flowed there 
a water, and it was impossible for any man there to have any 
entering. And this castle stood without the city of Rome. And 
this entering of this gate was made with twenty-four iron flails, 
and on every side were there twelve men on each side still a 
piece smiting with the flails, never ceasing, the one after the 
other ; and no man might come in, without the flails stood still, 
but he was slain. And these flails were made with such a gin 
[contrivance] that Yirgilius stopped them when he list to enter 
in thereat, but no man else could find the way. And in this 
castle put Virgilius part of his treasure privily ; and, when this 
was done, hcj^ imagined in his mind by what mea'ns he might 
make himself young again, because he thought to live longer 
many years, to do many wonders and marvellous things. And 
upon a time went Virgilius to the emperor, g-nd asked him of 
license [of absence] by the space of three weeks. But the em- 
peror in no wise would grant it unto him, for he would have 
Yirgilins at all times by him. Then heard he that Virgilius 
went to his house, and took with him one of his men that he 
above all men trusted and knew well that he would best keep 
his counsel ; and they departed to his castle that was without 
the town, and, when they were afore the castle, there saw the 
men stand with iron flails in their hands sore smiting. Then 
Virgilius said to his man, ' Enter you first into the castle.' Then 
answered the man and said, ' If 1 should enter, the flails would 
slay me.' Then showed Virgilius to the man of each side the 
entering in, and all the vices [screws] that thereto belonged ; and 
when he had shown him all the ways, he made cease the flails, 
and went into the castle. And when they were both in, Virgil- 
ius turned the vices again, and so went the iron flails as they 
did afore. Then said Virgilius, ' My dear beloved friend, and he 
that I above all men trust, and know most of my secrets ;' and 
then let he the man into the cellar, where he had made a fair 
lamp at all seasons burning. And then said Virgilius to the 
man, ' See you the barrel that standeth here V And he said, 
' Ye must put me there ; first ye must slay me, and hew me 
small to pieces, and cut my head in four pieces, and saU the 
head under in the bottom, and then the pieces thereafter, and 
my heart in the middle, and then set the barrel under the lamp, 
that night and day therein may drop and leke ; and ye shall nine 
days long once in the day fill the lamp, and fail not ; and when 
this is all done, then shall I be renewed and made young again, 
and live long time and many winters more, if that it fortune me 



VIRGIL'S DEATH. 79 

not to be taken of above and die.' * And when the man beard 
his master Virgilius speak thus, he was sore abashed, and said, 
' That will I never while I live, for in no manner will I slay you.' 
Then said Virgilius, ' Ye at this time must do it, for it shall be 
no grief unto you.' And at last Virgilius entreated his man so 
much, that he consented to him ; and then the servant took Vir- 
gilius, and slew him, and when he was thus slain, he hewed 
him in pieces, and salted him in the barrel, and cut his head in 
four pieces as his master bade him, and then put the heart in 
the middle, and salted them well ; and when all this was done, 
he hung the lamp right over the barrel, that it might at all times 
drop in thereto. And when he had done all this, he went out of 
the castle and turned the vices, and then went the copper men 
smiting with their flails as strongly upon the iron anvils as they 
did before, that there durst no man enter; and he came every 
day to the castle and filled the lamp, as Virgilius had bade him. 
" And as the emperor missed Virgilius by the space of seven 
days, he marvelled greatly where he should be become ; but 
Virgilius was killed and laid in the cellar by his servant that 
he loved so well. And then the emperor thought in his mind 
to ask Virgilius's servant where Virgilius his master was ; and so 
he did, for he knew well that Virgilius loved him above all men 
in the world. Then answered the servant to the emperor, and 
said, ' Worshipful lord, and it please your grace, I wot not where 
he is, for it is seven days past that I saw him last; and then 
went he forth I can not tell whither, for he would not let me go 
with him.' Then was the emperor angry with that answer, and 
said, 'Thou liest, false thief that thou art; but without thou 
show me shortly where he is, I shall put thee to death.' With 
those words was the man abashed, and said, ' Worshipful lord, 
seven days ago I went with him without the town to the castle, 
and there he went in, and there I left him, for he would not let 
me in with him.' Then said the emperor, ' Go with me to the 
same castle ;' and so he did ; and when they came afore the 
castle and would have entered, they might not, because the flails 
smote so fast. Theii said the emperor, ' Make appease these 
flails that we may come in.' Then answered the man, ' I know 
not the way.' Then said the emperor, ' Then shalt thou die.' 
And then, .through the fear of death, he turned the vices and 
made the flails stand still ; and then the emperor entered into 
the castle with all his folk, and sought all about in every corner 

" A similar mode of renovation occurs not unfrequently in medieval tales and 
legends. It seems to have had its origin in the classic story of Medea. 



80 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

after Virgilius, and at. the last they sought so long that they 
came into the cellar where they saw the lamp hang over the 
barrel, where Virgilius lay indeed. Then asked the emperor 
the man, who had made him so hardy to put his master Virgilius 
so to death; and the man answered no word to the emperor. 
And then the emperor, with great anger, drew out his sword, 
and slew he there Virgilius' man. And when all this was done, 
then saw the emperor and all his folk a naked child, three times 
running about the barrel, saying the words, ' Cursed be the time 
that ye came ever here !' And with those words vanished the 
child away, and was never seen again ; and thus abode Virgil- 
ivis in the barrel, dead. Then was the emperor very heavy for 
the death of Virgilius, and also all Virgilius' kindred, and also 
all the scholars that dwelt about the town of Naples, and in 
especial the town of Naples, for because that Virgilius was the 
founder thereof, and made it of great worship. Then thought 
the emperor to have the goods and riches of Virgilius ; but there 
were none so hardy that durst come in to fetch it, for fear of the 
copper men that smote so fast with their iron flails ; and so 
abides Virgilius's treasure in the cellar." 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE LATER MEDIEVAL TYPES OF THE MAGICIAN FRIAR 

BACON AND DR. FAUSTUS. 

We have seen the type of the magician as it was formed at an 
early period, and in a particular locality and circumstances. 
Virgil the enchanter was the creation of the popular imagination 
to represent its notion of the wonders of ancient science and art. 
It was the type of the sorcerer as it arose out of the wreck of 
antiquity. But the middle ages wanted a type of its own time,' 
which should represent, according to the notions of the vulgar, 
the consciousness of that extraordinary science which was pro- 
ducing present wonders. This it soon found in one of the great- 
est of its own scholastics, the celebrated Roger Bacon. 

So naturally was the notion of magic connected with that of 
superior learning in the mind of the multitude, that few of the 
great scholars of the middle ages escaped the imputation. Prob- 
ably in their own time, Roger Bacon, and Grosseteste, and 



FRIAR BACON. 81 

others, enjoyed the same reputation in this respect as the more 
ancient Gerbert. This was the case with Bacon especially, 
who devoted himself so much to practical science, and whose 
chemical discoveries (such as that of gunpowder), his optical 
glasses, and his mechanical contrivances, were the wonder of 
the thirteenth century. A few of the genuine traditions relating 
to him are found scattered in old writings, such as that of the 
brazen head, and others connected with his glasses. One of 
them tells us of Friar Bacon's (as he was usually termed) com- 
pact with the evil one, and the artful manner in which he eva- 
ded it. It is said that his agreement stipulated that he was to 
belong to the devil after his death, if he died in the church or 
out of it ; but the wily magician, when he felt his end approach- 
ing, caused a cell to be made in the wall of the church, where 
he died and was buried, neither in the church nor without, and 
thus the fiend was cheated of his prey. 

When, in the sixteenth century, the study of magic was pur- 
sued with increased zeal, the celebrity of Friar Bacon became 
more popular, and was spread wider ; and not only were the tra- 
ditions worked up into a popular book, entitled " The History of 
Friar Bacon," but one of the dramatists of the age, Robert Greene, 
founded upon them a play, which was often acted, and of which 
there are several editions. The greater part of the history of 
;Friar Bacon, as far as it related to that celebrated personage, is 
evidently the invention of the writer, who appears to have lived 
in the time of Queen Elizabeth; he adopted some of the older 
traditions, and filled up his narrative with fables taken from the 
common story-books of the age.- We are here first made ac- 
quainted with two other legendary conjurers, Friars Bungay 
and Vandermast ; and the recital is enlivened with the pranks of 
Bacon's servant Miles. 

According to this legendary history, Roger Bacon was the son 
of a wealthy farmer in the west of England, who had placed his 
son with the parish priest to gain a little scholarship. The boy 
soon showed an extraordinary ability/ for learning, which was en- 
couraged by the priest, but which was extremely disagreeable to 
the father, who intended him for no other profession but that of 
the plough. Young Bacon fled from home, and took shelter in a 
monastery, where he followed his studies to his heart's content, 
and was eventually sent to complete them at Oxford. There he 
made himself a proficient in the occult sciences, and attained to 
the highest proficiency in magic. At length he had an opportu- 
nity of exhibiting his skill before the court, and the account of 



g2 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

liis exploits on this occasion may be given as a sample of tlie 
style of this quaint old history. 

" The king being in Oxfordshire at a nobleman's house, was 
very desirous to see this famous friar, for he had heard many 
times of his wondrous things that he had done by his art, there- 
fore he sent one for him to desire him to come to the court 
Friar Bacon kindly thanked the king by the messenger and said 
that he was at the king's service, and would suddenly attend 
him ; ' but, sir,' saith he to the gentleman, ' I pray make you haste 
or else I shall be two hours before you at the court.— 'For all 
your learning,' answered the gentleman, 'I can hardly believe 
this, for scholars, old men, and travellers, may lie by autiiority. 
' ' To strengthen your belief,' said Friar Bacon, ' I could presently 
show you^the last wench that you were withal, but I will not at 
this time '— ' One is as true as the other,' said the gentleman 
' and I would laugh to see either.'—' You shall see them both 
within these four hours,' quoth the friar, ' and therefore make 
what haste you can.' ' I will prevent that by my speed, said the , 
gentleman, and with that he rid his way ; but he rode out ot his 
way, as it should seem, for he had but five miles to ride, and yet 
was he better than three hours a riding them, so that Friar Bacon 
by his art was with the king before he came. 

" The king kindly welcomed him, and said that he long time 
had desired to see him, for he had as yet not heard of his hke. 
Friar Bacon answered him, that fame had belied him, and given 
him that report that his poor studies had never deserved tor he 
believed that art had many sons more excellent than himselt 
was. The king commended him for his modesty, and told hira 
that nothing could become a wise man less than boasting : but 
yet withal he requested him now to be no niggard of his knowl- 
ed<Te, but to show his queen and him some of his skill. ' I were 
worthy of neither art nor knowledge,' quoth Friar Bacon, ' should 
I deny your majesty this small request; I pray seat yourselves, 
and you shall see presently what my poor skill can perform. 
The king, queen, and nobles, sat them all down. They having 
so done, the friar waved his wand, and presently was heard 
such excellent music, that they were all amazed, for they all 
said they had never heard the like. ' This is,' said the Iriar, 
' to delight the sense of hearing,— I will delight all your other 
senses ere you depart hence.' So waving his wand again, there 
was louder music heard, and presently five dancers entered, the 
first like a court laundress, the second like a footman, the third 
like a usurer, the fourth like a prodigal, the fifth like a fool. 



BACON AT COURT. S3 

These did divers excellent changes, so that they gave content to 
all the beholders, and having done their dance they all vanished 
away in their order as they came in. Thus feasted he two of 
their senses. Then vi'aved he his wand again, and there was 
another kind of music heard, and while it was playing, there 
was suddenly before them a table, richly covered with all sorts 
of delicacies. Then desired he the king and queen to taste of 
some certain rare fruits that were on the table, which they and 
the nobles there present did, and were very highly pleased with 
the taste ; they being satisfied, all vanished away on the sudden. 
Then waved he his wand again, and suddenly there was such a 
smell, as if all the rich perfumes in the whole Avorld had been 
then prepared in the best manner that art could set them out. 
While he feasted thus their smelling, he waved his wand again, 
and there came divers nations in sundry habits, as Russians, Po- 
landers, Indians, Armenians, all bringing sundry kinds of furs, 
such as their countries yielded, all which they presented to the 
king and queen. These furs were so soft to the touch, that 
they highly pleased all those that handled them. Then, after 
some odd fantastic dances, after their country manner, they van- 
ished away. Then asked Friar Bacon the king's majesty if that 
he desired any more of his skill. The king answered that he 
was fully satisfied for that time, and that he only now thought of 
something that he might bestow on him, that might partly satisfy 
the kindness that he had received. Friar Bacon said that he 
desired nothing so much as his majesty's love, and if that he 
might be assured of that, he would think himself happy in it. 
' For that,' said the king, ' be thou ever sure of it, in token of 
which receive this jewel,' and withal gave him a costly jewel 
from his neck. The friar did with great reverence thank his 
majesty, and said, ' As your majesty's vassal you shall ever find 
me ready to do you service ; your time of need shall find it both 
beneficial and delightful. But among all these gentlemen I 
see not the man that your grace did send for me by ; sure he 
hath lost his way, or else Riet with some sport that detains him 
so long ; I promised to be here before him, and all this noble as- 
sembly can witness 1 am as good as my word — I hear him 
coming.' With that entered the gentleman, all bedirted, for he 
had rid through ditches, quagmires, plashes, and waters, that he 
was in a most pitiful case. He, seeing the friar there, looked 
full angrily, and bid a plague on all his devils, for they had led 
him out of his way, and almost drowned him. ' Be not angry, 
sir,' said Friar Bacon, ' here is an old friend of yours that hath 



g4 SORCERY A?fD MAGIC. 

more cause, for she hath tarried these three hours for you'- 
with that he pulled up the hangings, and behind them stood a 
kitchen-maid with a basting-ladle m her hand- now am I as 
good as my word with you? for I promised to help you to your 
Leetheart-how do you like this ?'-' So ill,' answered the gen- 

diran, that 1 will be revenged of y----\^^^^^'^\X; Za 
Friar Bacon, ' lest I do you more shame, and do you take heed 
how you give scholars the lie again; but because I k"^ "^^ . 
how well you are stored with money at this time, I will bear 
your wench's charges home ' With that she vanished away. ^ 
This may be taken as a sort of exemplification of the c ass o 
exhibitions which were probably the result of superior knowl- 
edge of natural science, and which were exaggerated by popu- 
lar imagination. They had been made, to a certain degree, 
familiar by the performances of the skilful jugglers who came 
from the East, and who were scattered throughout Europe ; and 
we read not unfrequently of such magical feats m old writers 
When the emperor Charles IV. was married m the middle ot 
the fourteenth century to the Bavarian princess Sophia m the 
city of Prague, the father of the princess brought a wagon-load 
of magicians to assist in the festivities. Two of the chief pro- 
ficients in the art, Zytho the great Bohemian sorcerer and 
Gouin the Bavarian, were pitched against each other, and w^e 
are told that after a desperate trial of skill, Zytho, opening his 
iaws from ear to ear, ate up his rival without stopping till he 
came to his shoes, which he spit out, because, as he said, they 
had not been cleaned. After having performed this stiange feat 
he restored the unhappy sorcerer to life again. The idea ot 
contests like this seems to have been taken from the scriptural 
narrative of the contention of the Egyptian magicians against 

Moses. ■, 1 • 1 • r 

We must run through Friar Bacon's other exploits more briet- 
ly. As I have said, the greater number of them are mere adap- 
tations of medieval stories ; but they ^how nevertheless, what was 
the popular notion of the magician's character. Such is the 
story of the gentleman Avho, reduced to poverty and involved m 
debt, sold himself to the evil one, on^ condition that he was to 
deliver himself up as soon as his debts-were paid. As may be 
imagined without much difficulty, he was not in haste to satisfy 
his ^creditors, but at length the time came when he could put 
them off no longer, and then, in his despair, he would have com- 
mitted violence on himself had not his hand been arrested by 
Bacon. The latter, when he had heard the gentleman's story, 



THE DEVIL OUTWITTED. 85 

directed him to repair to the place appointed for his meeting 
with the evil one, to deny the devil's claim, and to refer for judg- 
ment to the first person who should pass. " In the morning, af- 
ter that he had blessed himself, he went to the wood, where he 
found the devil ready for* him. So soon as he came near, the 
devil said : ' Now, deceiver, are you come ? Now shall thou 
see that I can and will prove that thou hast paid all thy debts, 
and therefore thy soul belongest to me.' — ' Thou art a deceiver,' 
said the gentleman, ' and gavest me money to cheat me of my soul, 
for else why wilt thou be thine own judge ? — let me have some 
others to judge between us.' — ' Content,' said the devil, ' take 
whom thou wilt.' — ' Then I will have,' said the gentleman, ' the 
next man that cometh this way.' Hereto the devil agreed. No 
sooner were these words ended, but Friar Bacon came by, to 
whom this gentleman spoke, and requested that he would be 
judge in a weighty matter between them two. The friar said he 
was content, so both parties were agreed: the devil said they 
were, and told Friar Bacon how the case stood between them in 
this manner. ' Know, friar, that I, seeing this prodigal like to 
starve for want of food, lent him money, not only to buy him vic- 
tuals, but also to redeem his lands and pay his debts, condition- 
ally, that so soon as his debts were paid, that he should give him- 
self freely to me ; to this, here is his hand,' showing him the 
bond : ' now my time is expired, for all his debts are paid, which 
he can not deny.' — ' This case is plain, if it be so that his debts 
are paid.' — ' His silence confirms it,' said the devil, ' therefore 
give him a just sentence.' — ' I will,' said Friar Bacon ; ' but first 
tell me' — speaking to the gentleman — ' didst thou never yet give 
the devil any of his money back, nor requite him in any ways V 
— ' Never had he anything of me as yet,' answered the gentle- 
man. ' Then never let him have anything of thee, and thou art 
free. Deceiver of mankind,' said he, speaking to the devil, ' it 
Vi^as thy bargain never to meddle with him so long as he was in- 
debted to any ; now, how canst thou demand of him anything 
when he is indebted for all that he hath to thee ? when he pay- 
eth thee thy money, then take him as thy due ; till then thou hast 
nothing to do with him, and so I charge thee to be gone.' At 
this the devil vanished with great horror, but Friar Bacon com- 
forted the gentleman, and sent him home with a quiet conscience, 
bidding him never to pay the devil's money back, as he tendered 
his own safety." 

Bacon now met with a companion. Friar Bungay, whose tastes 
and pursuits were congenial to his own, and with his assistance 



SG SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

he undertook the exploit for which he was most famous. He had 
a fancy that he would defend England against its enemies, by 
walling it with brass, preparatory to which they made a head of 
that metal. Their intent was to make the head speak, for which 
purpose they raised a spirit in a Avood^ by whose directions they 
made a fumigation, to which the head was to be exposed during 
a month, and to be carefully watched, because if the two friars 
did not hear it before it had given oA^er speaking, their labor 
would be lost. Accordingly, the care of watching over the head 
while they slept was intrusted to Bacon's man, Miles. The pe- 
riod of speaking unfortunately came while Miles was watching. 
The head suddenly uttered the two words " Time is." Miles 
thought it was unnecessary to disturb his master for such a brief 
speech, and sat still. In half an hour, the head again broke si- 
lence with the words, " Time was." Still Miles wailed, until, 
in another half hour, the head said, " Time is past," and fell to 
the ground with a terrible noise. Thus, through the negligence 
of Miles, the labor of the two friars was thrown away. 

The king soon wanted Friar Bacon's services, and the latter en- 
abled him, by his perspective and burning-glasses, to take a town 
which he was besieging. In consequence of this success, the 
kings of England and France made peace, and a grand court was 
held, at which the German conjurer, Vandermast, was brought to 
try his skill against Bacon. Their performances were some- 
thing in the style of Bacon's former exhibition before the king 
and queen. Vandermast, in revenge, sent a soldier to kill Bacon, 
but in vain. Next follow a series of adventures which consist 
of a few medieval stories very clumsilj^ put together, among which 
are that known as the Friar and the Boy, the one which appeared 
in Scottish verse, under the title of the Friars of Berwick, a tale 
taken from the Gesta Romanorum, and some others. A contention 
in magic between Vandermast and Bungay ended in the deaths 
of both. The servant Miles next turned conjurer, having got 
hold of one of Bacon's books, and escaped with a dreadful fright and 
a broken leg. Everything now seemed to go wrong. Friar Bacon 
" had a glass which was of that excellent nature, that any man 
might behold anything that he desired to see within the compass of 
fifty miles round about him." In this glass he used to show people 
what their relations and friends were doing, or where they were, 
One day, two young gentlemen of high birth came to look into 
the glass, and they beheld their fathers desperately fighting to- 
gether, upon which they drew their swords and slew each other. 
Bacon was so shocked that he broke his glass in disgust, a:nd 



DE, FAUSTUS. 87 

hearing about the same time of the deaths of Vandermast and 
Bungay, he became melancholy, and at length he burnt his books 
of magic, distributed his wealth among poor scholars and others, 
and became an anchorite. Thus ended the life of Friar Bacon, 
according to " the famous history," which probably owed most 
of its incidents to the imagination of the writer. 

The character of Dr. Faustus seems, as a magician, to be more 
veritable than that of Friar Bacon. His history, which was 
transferred to English literature direct from the German, ap- 
peared in England about the same time. There appears, in fact, 
to have lived in the earlier part of the sixteenth century a great 
magician and conjuror of the name of Faust, or Latinized, Faus- 
tus, a native of Kundling, in the duchy of Wirtemberg, whose 
celebrity gave rise to the book entitled " The History of the Life 
and Death of Dr. Faustus," which became so popular in Eng- 
land, that it was brought on the stage by one of the best dramatists 
of the Elizabethan age, Greene, and went into a proverb in our lan- 
guage, and has been embodied in oae of the most extraordinary 
productions of the literature of our age, the Faust of Goethe. 

Still we must look upon Dr. Faustus as one of the types only 
of the art, for we have no authentic account of what he did per- 
form. The book consists, like the histories of Virgil and Bacon, 
of a mere collection of stories of magic and incantation, many 
of them probably invented for the occasion, and all of them fa- 
thered upon one personage, whose name had become sufficiently 
notorious for the purpose. According to this history, Faustus was 
the son of a German boor, and being remarkable for his early 
talents, was adopted by a rich uncle at Wittenburg, who enabled 
him to pursue his studies at a celebrated university in that city. 
The inclinations of Faustus led. him into the forbidden paths of 
science, and at length he became such a proficient in magic that 
he determined to call up the demon. So " taking his way to a 
thick wood near to Wittenburg, called in the German tongue 
Spisserholt, he came into the wood one evening into the cross- 
way, where he made with a wand a circle in the dust, and within 
that many more circles and characters ; and thus he passed away 
the time until it was nine or ten of the clock in the night ; then be- 
gan Dr. Faustus to call on Mephistophiles the spirit, and to charge 
him in the name of Beelzebub to appear there presently, without 
any long stay. Then presently the devil began so great a rumor 
in the wood, as if heaven and earth would have come together, 
with wind, and the trees bowed their tops to the ground. Then 
fell the devil to roar, as if the whole wood had been full of lions 



88 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

and suddenly about the circle run the devil, as if a thousand wag- 
ons had been running together on paved stones. After this, at 
the four corners of the vv^ood it thundered horribly, with such 
lightning as if the whole world to his seeming had been on fire. 
Faustus all this while, half amazed at the devil's so long tarry- 
ing, and doubting whether he were best to abide any more such 
horrible conjurings, thought to leave his circle and depart, where- 
upon the devil made him such music of all sorts, as if the nymphs 
themselves had been in the place. Whereat Faustus revived, 
and stood stoutly in the circle, expecting his purpose, and began 
again to conjure the spirit Mephistophiles in the name of the 
prince of devils, to appear in his likeness ; whereat suddenly 
over his head hung hovering in the air a mighty dragon. Then 
calls Faustus again after his devilish manner ; at which there 
was a monstrous cry in the wood, as if hell had been open, and 
all the tormented souls cursing their condition. Presently, not 
three fathoms above his head, fell a flame in manner of lightning, 
and changed itself into a globe ; yet Faustus feared it not, but 
did persuade himself that the devil should give him his request 
before he would leave. Then Faustus, vexed at his spirit's so 
long tarrying, used his charm, with full purpose not to depart be- 
fore he had his intent ; and crying on Mephistophiles the spirit, 
suddenly the globe opened, and sprung up in the height of a man ; 
so, burning a time, in the end it converted to the shape of a fiery 
man. This pleasant beast ran about the circle a great while, 
and lastly, appeared in the manner of a gray friar, asking Faus- 
tus what was his request. Faustus commanded, that the next 
morning at twelve of the clock he should appear to him at his 
house ; but the devil would in no wise grant it. Faustus began 
to conjure him again, in the name of Beelzebub, that he should 
fulfil his request ; whereupon the spirit agreed, and so they de- 
parted each on his way." 

The spirit accordingly visited Faustus, and after three inter- 
views, they came to an agreement, by which the doctor, as the 
price of his soul, was to have Mephistophiles for his servant, 
and have a certain allotment of life, during which he would have 
the full gratification of his power in everything. One of the first 
uses which Faustus made of the power he had now obtained 
was to gratify his ardent thirst for knowledge, and by the aid of 
his spirit Mephistophiles, he soon surpassed all others in the 
kuowledge of hidden causes. All his desires were fulfilled the 
instant they were formed, so that he lived a life of unrestrained 
gratification. He travelled with inconceivable rapidity, not only 



FAUSTUS AND THE JUGGLERS. 89 

through different countries, but into the remotest regions of the 
air, and even into hell, and thus he became a profound astrono- 
mer, and was initiated in some measure into the secrets of the 
other world. He now " fell to be a calendar-maker by the help 
of his spirit," and nobody's prognostications were equal to those 
of Dr. Faustus. His travels were so extensive, that he even ob- 
tained a glimpse of Paradise ; and in the course of his wander- 
ings he played all sorts .of pranks. Among other victims of his 
wantonness Avere the Grand Turk and the pope of Rome. 

When the emperor Charles V., we are told, was holding his 
court at Inspruck, he invited Faustus to make an exhibition of 
his skill, and to gratify him he raised up the spirits of Alexan- 
der the Great and his beautiful paramour, to the emperor's no 
small delight. Some of the courtiers having provoked him, he 
transformed them, and exposed them to the ridicule of their com- 
panions. After leaving the court, he performed a variety of 
tricks upon persons of all conditions, whom he met on his way. 
He pawned his leg to a Jew for money. At the fair of Pfeiffeng, 
he sold a horse to a horse-dealer, with a warning not to ride 
through a course of water with it; but the dealer, having dis- 
obeyed these directions, found himself suddenly sitting astride a 
bottle of straw. He alarmed a countryman by eating a load of 
hay ; and wherever he found students or clowns drinking to- 
gether, he seldom failed to make them victims of his art. He 
subsequently performed extraordinary exploits at the court of the 
duke of Anhalt ; and he gave equally extraordinary specimens 
of his power in a series of extravagant feats .with which he 
treated the students of AVittenburg, and which he ended by call- 
ing up to their sight the fair Helen of Troy. 

" Dr. Faustus came in Lent unto Frankland fair, 'where his 
spirit Mephistophiles gave him to understand that in an inn were 
four jugglers that cut one another's heads off, and after their cut- 
ting off sent them to the barber to be trimmed, which many peo- 
ple saw. This angered Faustus, for he meant to have himself 
the only cook in the devil's banquet, and he went to the place 
where they were to beguile them. And as the jugglers were 
together, rea.dy one to cut off another's head, there stood also the 
barber ready to trim them, and by them upon the table stood like- 
wise a glass full of stilled waters, and he that was the chiefest 
among them stood by it. Thus they began : they smote off the 
head of the first, and presently there v/as a lily in the glass of 
distilled water, where Faustus perceived this lily as it Avas 
springing up, and the chief juggler named it the tree of life. 



90 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Thus dealt he with the first, making the barber wash and comb 
his head, and then he set it on again ; presently the lily vanished 
away out of the water ; hereat the man had his head whole and 
sound again. The like did he with the other two ; and as the 
turn and lot came to the chief juggler, that he also should be be- 
headed, and that his lily was most pleasant, fair, and flourishing 
green, they smote his head off, and when it came to be barbed 
[that is, shaA'^ed], it troubled Faustus his conscience, insomuch 
that he could not abide to see another do anything, for he thought 
himself to be the principal conjurer in the world ; wherefore Dr. 
Faustus went to the table whereat the other jugglers kept that 
lily, and so he took a small knife and cut off the stalk of the 
lily, saying to himself, ' None of them shall blind Faustus.' Yet 
no man saw Faustus to cut the lily ; but when the rest of the 
jugglers thought to have set on their mastei''s head, they could 
not ; wherefore they looked on the lily, and found it bleeding. 
By this means the juggler was beguiled, and so died in his wick- 
edness ; yet no one thought that Dr. Faustus had done it." 

It was about this time that Faustus had a fit of repentance, for 
which, he was severely rebuked by his spirit Mephistophiles, 
who forced him to sign a new bond with the evil one. From 
this time he became more headstrong and depraved than ever, 
and, to use the words of the history, " he began to live a swinish 
and Epicurean life." He now caused Mephistophiles to bring 
him the fair Helen of Troy, with whom he fell violently in love, 
and kept her during the rest of his life as his mistress ; but she, 
and a child she bore him, vanished together on his death. This 
was not long in approaching, and when his last day was at hand, 
he invited his fellow-students to a supper, and gave them a moral 
discourse on his own errors, and an urgent warning to avoid his 
example. " The students and the others that were there, when 
they had prayed for him, they wept, and so went forth; but 
Faustus tarried in the hall ; and when the gentlemen were laid 
in bed, none of them could sleep, for that they attended to hear 
if they might be privy of his end. It happened that between 
twelve and one o'clock at midnight there blew a mighty storm 
of wind against the house, as though it would have blown the 
foundation thereof out of its place. Hereupon the students be- 
gan to fear, and go out of their beds, but they would not stir out 
of the chamber, and the host of the house ran out of doors, think- 
ing the house would fall. The students lay near unto the hall 
wherein Dr. Faustus lay, and they heard a mighty noise and 
hissing, as if the hall had been full of snakes and adders. With 



DEATH OF DR. FAUSTUS. 91 

tliat the hall-door flew open wherein Dr. Faustus was ; then he 
began to cry for help, saying, ' Murther ! murther !' but it was 
with a half voice and very hollow ; shortly after they heard him 
no more. But vi^hen it was day, the students, that had taken no 
rest that night, arose and went into the hall in the which they 
left Dr. Faustus, where, notwithstanding, they found not Faustus, 
but all the hall sprinkled with blood, the brains cleaving to the 
wall, for the devil had beaten him from one wall against another ; 
in one corner lay his eyes, in another his teeth ; a fearful and 
pitiful sight to behold. Then began the students to wail and 
weep for him, and sought for his body in many places. Lastly, 
they came into the yard, where they found his body lying on the 
horse-dung, most monstrously torn, and fearful to behold, for his 
head and all his joints were dashed to pieces. The forenamed 
students and masters that were at his death, obtained so much 
that they buried him in the village where he was so grievously 
tormented." 

Such was the end which it was believed awaited the magi- 
cians who entered into a direct compact with the evil one. The 
history of Dr. Faustus has been the delight and wonder of thou- 
sands in various countries and through several ages. The pop- 
ularity of the book was so great, that another author undertook 
to compile a continuation. Faustus, it was pretended, had left 
a familiar servant, named Christopher Wagner, with whom he 
had deposited his greatest secrets, and to whom he had left his 
books and his art. The exploits of Wagner form what is called 
the second part of Dr. Faustus, which seems to have been com- 
piled in England, and was published long subsequent to the first 
part. Wagner is made to call up the spirit of his master Faus- 
tus, and compel him to serve as his familiar. The book contains 
a repetition of the same descriptions of exorcisms which had 
been used by Faustus toward Mephistophiles, and of similar 
exploits. 

The foregoing are types of the popular belief during many cen- 
turies. They picture to us the notion of the. magician as it ex- 
isted in people's imagination. We must now return to the reality 
of these superstitions, as it is presented to us by the history of 
past ages. 



SORCERY AND MAGIC. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

SORCERY IN GERMANY IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY; THE 
MALLEUS MALEFICARUM. 

Since the establishment of the inquisition, and the practice of 
drawing the crime of sorcery under its jurisdiction, the belief in 
its effects was becoming more intense, and was spreading more 
widely. In the fifteenth century the holy inquisition had grad- 
ually formed the witchcraft legends into a regular system, and 
when published under such authority few would venture to dis- 
believe it. It was in Germany, indeed, that the belief in witch- 
craft seems to have first taken that dark, systematical form which 
held so fearful a sway over men's minds in the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries. There the wilder superstitions of the 
ancient Teutonic creed have been preserved in greater force than 
in any other part of Europe. The pious legends of Csesarius of 
Heisterbach, who flourished in the earlier part of the thirteenth 
century, are little better than a masg of stories of magic and 
sorcery. The imaginative feelings of the people, and the wild 
character of many paxts of the country, were peculiarly calcula- 
ted to foster superstitions of this description. 

In fact, we may there trace back distinctly most of the cir- 
cumstances of the earlier belief relating to witchcraft to the my- 
thology of the ante-christian period. The grand night of meet- 
ing of the German witches was the night of St. Walpurgis, 
which answered to one of the great religious festivals of the 
Teutonic tribes before their conversion. In after-times two other 
nights of annual assembly were added, those of the feasts of St. 
John and St. Bartholomew. ^ It is probable that, as Christianity 
gained ground, and became established as the religion of the 
state, the old religious festivals, to which the lower and more ig- 
norant part of the people, and particularly the weaker sex (more 
susceptible of superstitious feelings), v/ere still attached, were 
celebrated in solitary places and in private, and those who fre- 
quented them were branded as witches and sorcerers who met 
together to hold communication with demons, for as such the 
earlier Christians looked upon all the heathen gods. This gi^'es 
us an easy explanation of the manner in which the heathen wor- 



GERMAN SORCERY. 93 

ship became transformed into the witchcraft of the middle ages. 
At an early period it was commonly believed that the witches 
(imholde) rode through the air to the place of rendezvous on reeds 
and sticks, or on besoms, which latter were the articles readiest 
at hand to women of this class of society. The chief place of 
meeting, at the great annual witch-festivals in Germany, appears 
to have been, from an early period, the Brocken mountain, the 
highest j)art of the wild Hartz chain ; but there were several 
other favorite places of resort. The persons believed to have 
been initiated at their assemblies were looked upon with dread., 
for they were supposed to be capable of injuring people in va- 
rious waj's, both in their persons and in their possessions, and 
their malice was especially directed against little children. One 
of the earliest trials for witchcraft, unconnected with other offen- 
ces, on the continent, is that of a woman in the bishopric of 
Novara, on the northern borders of Italy, about the middle of the 
fourteenth century ; and it illustrates the general belief in Ger- 
many at that period: It appears, from the slight accovmt which 
remains of this trial (Avhich is printed in a collection of criminal 
cases in Latin, by Joh. Bapt. Ziletti, fol. Franck. 1578), that the 
belief then held by the church was, that women of this class 
could, by their touch or look, fascinate men, or children, or 
beasts, so as to produce sickness and death ; and they believed 
further, that they had devoted their own souls to the demon, to 
whom also they had done personal homage, after having tram- 
pled underfoot the figure of the cross. For these offences they 
were judged by the most learned theologians to be worthy of 
being burnt at the stake. 

In the earlier period of the history of witchcraft in Germany, 
we find no traces of the more repulsive details of the sabbath of 
the sorcerers; and it is, therefore, probable that they were intro- 
duced there perhaps not before the fourteenth century, and that 
even during that century they did not constitute an article of the 
general belief. They appear to have originated in France and 
Italy, where there is reason for believing, that down to a late pe- 
riod some of the worst sects of the ancient Gnostics retained a 
footing. These sects appear to have been justly accused with 
the celebration of infamous rites, or rather orgies, which the po- 
pish church found it convenient to lay to the charge of all whom 
it thought right to class under the title of heretics. The 
church, it is well known, claimed the right of judging witch- 
craft, 'by considering it as a heresy, or as akin to heresy, and 
it is probable that by the confusion of ideas thus produced, the 



94 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

orgies of the Gnostics were transferred to the sabbath of the 
witches. 

During the period of which we have been speaking, men of 
sense in Germany, and the better educated and less bigoted por- 
tion of the clergy, appear to have looked upon the whole as a 
delusion ; witchcraft was a crime, inasmuch as it was an act of 
vulgar superstition. Some of the early councils forbid the belief 
in it, and consequently the partaking in any of its practices- and 
ceremonies. It only rose to higher estimation in the age of in- 
quisitors. Toward the middle and during the latter half of the 
fifteenth century, the question of witchcraft began to bp much 
agitated. The wholesale persecutions of witches had com- 
menced with the celebrated council of Constance (1414 to 1418), 
which had proscribed the doctrines of WyclifFe, and condemned 
John Huss and Jerome of Prague to the flames. One of the in- 
quisitors of this period, a Swiss friar preacher named John Nider, 
published a work on the various sins and crimes againt religion, 
under the title of Formic ariuin (or the Ant-hill), the fifth book of 
which is devoted to the subject of sorcery. This book was pub- 
lished toward the year 1440, for it speaks of the latter events of 
the life of Joan of Arc as having occurred within ten years ; and 
the author's information, relative to sorcerers, appears to be 
mainly derived from the inquisitor of Berne, named Peter, who 
had distinguished himself by his liiactivity in the pursuit of 
witches and sorcerers, and had caused a great number of them 
to be burnt. 

According to John Nider, the injury done by the witches was 
manifold, and difficult to be guarded against ; and we are amused 
with the various absurd formulae of exorcism which he recom- 
mends against their effects, as though, if their object were to 
drive away the evil one, or to call upon Divine interference, one 
proper formula would not be sufficient for every case that could 
occur. They raised at will destructive storms ; they caused bar- 
renness, both of living beings and of the fruits of the earth : a 
man at Poltingen, in the diocese of Lausanne, by placing a 
charmed lisard under the doorstead of a house, is stated to -have 
caused the good woman of the house to have abortive births dur- 
ing seven years, and to have produced the same effect on all 
living creatures of her sex which remained within her dwelling ; 
when the sorcerer was seized, and made a full confession of his 
evil practices, no lizard was found in the spot indicated, but as it 
was supposed during so long a period of time to have been en- 
tirely decomposed by decay, all the dust under the door was care- 



SOKCERY IN SWITZERLAND. 95 

fully carried away, and from that time the inmates were relieved 
from this severe visitation. They sometimes raised illicit love ;* 
and at others, hindered the consummation of marriage, excited 
hatred between man and wife, and raised dissensions between 
the dearest friends. They drove horses mad, and made them 
run away with their riders. They conveyed away the property of 
others into their own possession ; though, in most of the examples 
cited, the property thus conveyed away consisted of articles of 
small value. They made known people's secrets, were endowed 
with the power of second-sight, and were able to foretell events. 
They carised people to be struck with lightning, or to be visited 
with grievous diseases ; and did many other " detestable things." 
Their enmity appears to have been especially directed against 
little children. There were persons of both sexes who con- 
fessed to having transformed themselves into wolves and other 
ravenous beasts, in order to devour them more at their ease. 
They watched opportunities of pushing them into rivers and 
wells, or of bringing upon them other apparently accidental 
deaths. Their appetite for children is said to have been so 
great, that when they could not get those of other persons, they 
Avould devour their own. They watched more especially new- 
born infants, which, if possible, they killed before baptism, in 
such a manner as to make the mothers believe that they had died 
naturally, or been overlain. When buried, the witches dug the 
bodies out of the graves, and carried them to the scene of their 
secret rites, where, with various charms, they boiled them in 
caldrons, and reduced them to an unguent, which was one of 
their most efhcient preparations. The liquor in which they 
were boiled was drawn off, and carefully preserved in flasks. 
Any one who drank of it, becaiiie in an instant a perfect master 
of the whole art of magic. 

Such were the Swiss witches of the beginning of the fifteenth 
century. The large proportion of the children which died in 
the middle ages, from want of cleanness and improper treatment, 
may account, in some measure, for the readiness with which 
people believed in the agency of witchcraft to cause their de- 
struction. John Nider makes not the slightest allusion to the 
witches' sabbath meetings, a circumstance which naturally leads 
us to suppose that this was not then an article of popular belief 
in the district with the superstitions of which he was acquainted. 

* This singular writer, among his remedies, indicates as the most effective one 
against tlie goadiugs of the passion of love in young men, to frequent the company 
of old women! Vetularum aspectus et coUoquia amorem excutiunt. 



96 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

They had sometimes meetings at which the demon appeared in 
person, either to initiate new converts, or to obtain his aid in the 
perpetration of some great mischief. 

A young man, named Stadelin, was seized at Berne, on sus- 
picion of being a sorcerer, and submitted to the most cruel tor- 
tures, until at last he was compelled to make a confession. He 
gave the following account of the mode in which a new sorcerer 
was initiated. He must first in a church, before witnesses who 
were already of the order, make a full denial of his faith and 
baptism. He was then taken to a meeting, and made to do hom- 
age to the " little master," as the demon 'was called. A flask 
was next brought forth, and he drank of the liquor above men- 
tioned, after which, without further instruction; he became fully 
and intimately acquainted with the whole art, and all the customs 
and practices of the sorcerers. " I and my v/ife," said Stadelin, 
" were thus seduced and initiated ; but she, I know, is too strong- 
ly possessed by the evil one, and too obstinate in her ill ways, 
to confess, although I know that we are both witches." The in- 
quisitor ordered Stadelin to be burnt because he had confessed, 
and his wife because she would not confess ; for so far the man's 
assertion was verified, that the poor woman denied all he said, 
and was dragged to the stake, obstinately persisting in the dec- 
laration that she was innocent. 

Stadelin confessed that he had been instrumental in perpetra- 
ting much mischief by means of thunder and lightning. The 
way, he said, in which they effected this, was to go to a place 
where there were cross-roads, and there call upon a demon, 
who immediately came. They then sacrificed to him a black 
chicken, and made their ofiering by tossing it up in the air. 
This was followed almost immediately by a violent storm, which 
was most destructive in the places that had been pointed out to 
the demon's anger. It may be observed, that the belief that 
storms were the work of demons, who were supposed to be pres- 
ent in them, was universally current during the middle ages. 

At this period, the demons, contrary to their practice in a la- 
ter age, seem to have exerted -themselves in the defence of their 
worshippers, when the latter were in danger of falling into the 
hands of justice. The evil one generally used his power to en- 
able his votaries to support their tortures without confessing. 
When the order was given to arrest Stadelin, the officers sent 
in seai'ch of him felt such a sudden numbness in their hands 
and members, that they were a long time before they could take 
hold of him. 



THE INQUISITOR PUNISHED. 97 

The witches, at this time, sometimes counteracted each other, 
which, according to the information given to John Nider by an- 
other inquisitor, was effected in the following manner : A per- 
son who believed himself to be bewitched, and who desired to 
•take vengeance on the person who had bewitched him, thouo^h 
entirely ignorant who was his tormentor, applied for this pur- 
pose to another witch, and told her his case. She immediately 
took lead, melted it, and threw it into a vessel of water, and, by 
magical agency, it received the rude shape of a man. She then 
said, " In which member of his body will you have me punish 
your enemy ?" And upon his naming the member, she struck 
a sharp instrument into the corresponding part of the leaden fig- 
ure. The inquisitor assured John Nider that the sorcerer who 
was the author of the witchcraft by which the complainant had 
been affected, neA^er failed to suffer in the identical part of the 
body which had been struck in effigy by the witch. 

The inquisitors themselves were not always safe from the ven- 
geance of the witches. Peter, the inquisitor of Berne, told Ni- 
der that he was obliged to be constantly on his guard, for he had 
been so great a persecutor of sorcerers, that he knew they had 
been long watching for an opportunity of injuring him. He, 
however, was strong in the faith, and he signed himself with the 
sign of the cross at night when he went to his bed, and again 
when he arose in the morning. Once, however, the opportu- 
nity, long looked for, occurred. 

Peter, while holding the office of judge over Berne, resided 
in the castle of Blanckenburg, which, on resigning his office, he 
quitted to return to a house in the city ; but, one of his own 
friends being elected his successor, he was not an unfrequent 
visiter to the castle. One day he went thither, and, in resigning 
himself to slumber, he signed himself as usual. It happened, 
however, that during the day he had committed some oversight 
in his religious duties, which took from this ceremony its ordi- 
nary degree of efficacy. It was his intention to rise in the mid- 
dle of the night, and to pass an hour or two in writing some 
correspondence of an important character. At midnight he was 
disturbed from his sleep in an unaccountable manner, and per- 
ceiving a light like that of day, he supposed that it was morning, 
and that his servant had forgot to call him at the time appointed. 
He rose from his bed in an ill-humor, and went down stairs to 
seek his writing materials, but he found that the room in which 
they had been left was locked. Peter now burst into a great 
rage, and returned upstairs to bed, muttering maledictions, but 

9 



98 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

he had hardly pronounced the words " in the devil's name !" (m 
nomine diaboU), when he suddenly found himself in utter dark- 
ness, amid dreadful noises, and he was struck down with so 
much force that he remained senseless on the steps, until his 
servant, who slept near, roused by the unusual noise, came to 
his assistance. For a time, the inquisitor seemed to be entirely 
deprived of his reason, and it was three weeks before he re- 
gained the perfect use of his members. 

The cause of this singular visitation Vv^as accidentally brought 
to light some time afterward. A man of Friburg, who was 
looked upon suspiciously in his own neighborhood, went on 
business to Berne, and sat in a tavern, drinking with some of 
the citizens. Suddenly he appeared abstracted, and exclaimed, 
" I see so-and-so [mentioning a man's name] creeping round my 
house, and stealing the lines I had laid in the river to catch fish." 
This was second-sight, or, as the mesmerist would say, clair- 
voyance, for the man's house was distant about six German miles, 
or, nearly thirty English miles, from Berne. The persons who 
were sitting by, looked at him with astonishment; and, after the 
first moment of surprise, taking him for a sorcerer, they seized 
upon him, and carried him before the inquisitor. The latter put 
him to the torture during two days, without effect ; but, on the 
third, which happened to be the feast of the Virgin, he made a 
confession, after stating that the demon had hindered him from 
confessing during the two preceding days, but that day, being 
under the influence of the Virgin, the fiend had lost his power. 
Among other things, he stated that he was one of four sorcer- 
ers, who had joined with a witch to take vengeance on the in- 
quisitor, who, as judge of Berne, had given judgment against her 
in some case which had come within his jurisdiction. He said, 
that on such a day (naming the day on which the inquisitor had 
paid his unlucky visit to Blanckenburg), having learned that the 
inquisitor was less on his guard than usual, they had met to- 
gether in a certain field, and, by means of sorcery, had caused 
the accident which had fallen upon him in the night. The in- 
quisitor gravely stated, that he did not believe that the individu- 
als themselves had been personally there to strike him, but that 
the devil had struck him, at their bidding. 

Fi'om the time of John Nider, the persecution of witches in 
Germany increased in intensity. In 1484, a bull of the pope 
appointed inquisitors for this especial purpose, and the following 
year they burnt upward of forty, within a small space on the 
borders of Austria and Italy. In 1486, the emperor Maximilian 



THE MALXEUS MALEFIC A RUM. 99 

I., then at Brussels, took the papal inquisitors, sent to put down 
witchcraft in Germany, under his protection. Nevertheless, the 
archduke Sigismund, who was prince of the Tyrol, and a man 
above the ordinary prejudices of his time, at first gave what 
protection he could to the miserable objects of persecution ; but 
he was at length obliged to allow himself to be carried away by 
the popular torrent. He employed Ulric Molitor to compose a 
dialogue on the subject, which was printed under the title De 
PytJionicis Mulieribus, at Constance, in the beginning of 1489. 
In this tract, the archduke Sigismund, Ulric Molitor, and a citi- 
zen of Constance, named Conrad Schak, are introduced as the 
interlocutors, Sigismund arguing against the common belief. In 
conclusion, the witches are judged worthy of execution, although 
the opinions here expressed as to witchcraft itself are by no 
means those of the inquisitors. From this time there arose two 
parties, one of which sustained that all the crimes imputed to 
the witches were real bona fide acts, while the other asserted 
that many of the circumstances to which they were made to con- 
fess, such as their being carried through the air, and their pres- 
ence at the sabbath, were mere delusions, produced on their im- 
agination by their master the devil. Both parties, however, 
agreed in general to the condemnation of the offenders. 

Under the papal inquisitors appointed by the bull of .1484, the 
persecution of people accused of witchcraft was carried on with 
a fury which can only be compared with what took place in dif- 
ferent countries at the latter part of the end of the following cen- 
tury. Hundreds of wretched indiyiduuls were publicly burnt at 
the stake within the space of a few years. As an apology for 
these proceedings, two of the inquisitors, Jacob Sprengar and 
(as the other is named in Latin) Henricus Institor, employed 
themselves in compiling a rather large volume under the title 
Malleus Maleficarum, which was printed before the end of the 
fifteenth century. In this celebrated work, the doctrine of witch- 
craft was first reduced to a regular system, and it was the model 
and groundwork of all that was written on the subject long after 
the date which saw its first appearance. Its writers enter large- 
ly into the much-disputed question of the nature of demons ; set 
forth the causes which lead them to seduce men in this manner ; 
and show why women are most prone to listen to their pro- 
posals, by reasons which prove that the inquisitors had but a 
mean estimate of the softer sex. The inquisitors show the most 
extraordinary skill in explaining all the difficulties which seemed 
to beset the subject ; they even prove to their entire satisfaction 



100 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

that persons who have become witches may easily change them- 
selves into beasts, particularly into wolves and cats ; and after the 
exhibition of such a mass of learning, few would venture any long- 
er to entertain a doubt. They investigate, not only the methods 
employed to effect various kinds of mischief, but also the coun- 
ter-charms and exorcisms that may be used against them. They 
likewise tell, from their own experience, the dangers to which 
the inquisitors were exposed, and exult in the fact that they were 
a class of men against whom sorcery had no power. These wri- 
ters actually tell us, that the demon had tried to frighten them by 
day and by night in the forms of apes, dogs, goats, &c. ; and that 
they frequently found large pins stuck in their night-caps, which 
they doubted not came there by witchcraft. When we hear these 
inquisitors asserting that the crime of which the witches were 
accused, deserved a more extreme punishment than all the vilest 
actions of which humanity is capable, we can understand in some 
degree the complacency with which they relate how, by their 
means, forty persons had been burned in one place, and fifty in 
another, and a still greater number in a third. From the time of 
the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, the continental press 
during two or three generations teemed with publications on the 
all-absorbing subject of sorcery. 

One of the points on which opinion had differed most was, 
whether the sorcerers were carried bodily through the air to the 
place of meeting, or whether it was an imaginary journey, sug- 
gested to their minds by the agency of the evil one. The au- 
thors of the Malleus decide at once in favor of the bodily trans- 
mission. One of them was personally acquainted with a priest of 
the diocese of Frisingen, who declared that he had in his younger 
days been carried through the air by a demon to a place at a very 
great distance from the spot whence he had been taken. An- 
other priest, his friend, declared that he had seen him carried 
away, and that he appeared to him to be borne up on a kind of cloud. 
At Baldshut, on the Rhine, in the diocese of Constance, a witch 
confessed, that offended at not having been invited to the wed- 
ding of an acquaintance, she had caused herself to be carried 
through the air, in open daylight, to the top of a neighboring 
mountain, and there, having made a hole with her hands and filled 
it with water, she had, by stirring the water with certain incanta- 
tions, caused a heavy storm to burst forth on the heads of the 
wedding-party ; and there were witnesses at the trial who swore 
they saw her carried through the air. The inquisitors, however, 
confess, that the witches were sometimes carried away, as they 



THE INVOKER OF RAIN. 101 

term it, in the spirit ; and they give the instance of one woman 
who was watched by her husband ; she appeared as if asleep, 
and was insensible, but he perceived a kind of cloudy vapor arise 
out of her mouth, and vanish from the room in which she lay — 
this after a time returned, and she then awoke, and gave an ac- 
count of her adventures, as though she had been carried bodily to 
the assembly. 

The Swiss and German witches are represented at this period 
as showing an extraordinary eagerness to make converts. The 
neophyte was admitted either at the great solemn assemblies or at 
smaller private meetings where the demon was present — he or 
she was obliged to deny faith in Christ, do homage to the demon, 
and then received from his hands a certain quantity of an un- 
guent, made of men's bones and the flesh of unbaptized infants. 
It was this unguent which, being rubbed on the body, enabled the 
sorcerer to travel through the air. 

Some persons, even of the same sex, were naturally more 
prone to become witches than others, and this was observed to 
run in families, so that when a witch was convicted, all her kin- 
dred fell under suspicion, and the number of prosecutions in- 
creased as they went on. The children of a witch almost always 
followed in the track of their mother, and they were sometimes 
endowed with the power of sorcery long before they arrived at 
an age to understand the sinfulness of their conduct. The rev- 
erend inquisitors who wrote the Malleus, tell us of a singular fact 
which had come under their own immediate notice. A farmer 
in Switzerland was walking out into his fields, and bitterly com- 
plaining of the want of rain which was rendering them sterile. 
A little girl of only eight years of age accosted him, and said in 
a playful manner, " You need not grieve for want of rain, for I 
can give you as much as you like." 

The latter, in astonishment, exclaimed, " Who taught thee to 
bring rain ?" 

" I learned it from my mother," was the reply. 

" And how do you proceed to effect this object?" inquired the 
farmer. 

" Give me some water," said the little girl, " and I will show you." 

The farmer took her to a small brook which was near at hand. 
" Now," said he, " if you can, cause the rain to fall upon all my 
fields, but upon those of no other person." 

The little girl put her hand in the water, stirred it in a partic- 
ular manner, muttering at the same time unintelligible words, and 
a plentiful shower fell upon the farmer's lands, as he desired. 

9* 



102 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

He then asked her if she could produce hail or thunder, and on 
her answering in the affirmative, he intimated his wish to have 
a sample of a hail-storm in one field only. The girl moved her 
hands more violently in the water, muttering other words, and a 
heavy shower of hail followed immediately. When the farmer, 
still more amazed at this instance of power in a child, inquired 
how she had been taught to (Jo this, she said, " My mother gave 
me a master, and he taught me." 

The farmer pressed her for a further explanation, and asked 
her if she saw this master visibly. 

" Yes," she said, " when I am with my mother I see men com- 
ing in and goii^g out, and these my mother tells me are our mas- 
ters." 

• This innocent revelation led to the seizure of the woman on 
suspicion of being a vi^itch ; she was carried before the inquisi- 
tors, put to the torture until she confessed, and then burnt. The 
child was spared on account of its age, but as a measure of pre- 
caution, it was placed in a nunnery. 

The witches of the Malleus Malleficaru7n appear to have been 
more injurious to horses and cattle than to mankind. A witch at 
Ravenspurg confessed that she had killed twenty-three horses by 
f sorcery. We are led to wonder most at the ease with which 
people are brought to bear witness to things utterly beyond the 
limits of belief. A man of the -name of StaufF, in the territory 
of Berne, declared that when pursued by the agents of justice, 
he escaped by taking the form of a mouse ; and persons were 
found to testify that they had seen him perform this transmuta- 
tion. 

The latter part of the work of the two inquisitors gives mi- 
nute directions for the mode in which the prisoners are to be 
treated, the means to be used to force them to a confession, the 
degree of evidence required for conviction of those who would 
not confess, and the whole process of the trials. These show 
sufficiently that the unfortunate wretch who was once brought 
before the inquisitors of the holy see on the suspicion of sorcery, 
however slight might be the groimds of the charge, had very 
small chance of escaping out of their claws. 

The Malleus contains no distinct allusion to the proceedings 
at the sabbath. The witches of this period differ little from 
those who had fallen into the hands of the earlier inquisitors of 
Constance. We see plainly how, in most countries, the myste- 
riously indefinite crime of sorcery had first been seized on to ruin 
the cause of great political offenders, until the fictitious import- 



WITCHCRAFT IN SCOTLAND. 103 

ance thus given to it brought forward into a prominent position, 
which they would, perhaps, never otherwise have held, the mis- 
erable class who were supposed to be more especially engaged 
in it. It was the judicial prosecutions and the sanguinary exe- 
cutions which followed, that stamped that character of reality on 
charges of which it required two or three centuries to convince 
mankind of the emptiness and vanity. One of the chief instru- 
ments in fixing the belief in sorcery, and in giving it that terri- 
ble hold on society which it exhibited in the following century, 
was the compilation of Jacob Sprenger and his fellow inquisitor. 
In this book sorcery was reduced to a system, but it was not yet 
perfect ; and we must look forward some half century before we 
find it clothed with all the horrors which cast so much terror in- 
to every class of society. 



CHAPTER IX. 

WITCHCRAFT IN SCOTLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

It has been already remarked, that the superstitions connected 
with sorcery and magic had their foundation in the earlier my- 
thology of the people. If we would perceive this connection 
more intimately, we have only to turn our eyes toward Scotland, 
a country in which this mythology had preserved its sway over 
the popular imagination much longer than in the more civilized 
south. We know but little of the Scottish popular superstitions 
until the sixteenth century, when they are found in nearly the 
same shape in which they had appeared in England in the twelfth 
and thirteenth centuries. In Scotland, witchcraft had not been 
magnified and modified by the systematical proceedings of eccle- 
siastical inquisitors, and it is therefore found in a much less 
sophisticated form. 

In Scotland, as in other parts of Europe, witchcraft first makes 
its appearance in judiciary proceedings as an instrument of polit- 
ical or personal animosity, and was used where other grounds 
of accusation were too weak to effect the objects of the accuser. 
In the latter half of the fifteenth century, the earl of Mar, brother 
of James III., was accused of consulting witches and sorcerers, 
in order to shorten the king's days, and he was bled to death in 
his own lodgings, whout even being brought to a trial. Twelve 



104 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

witches, and three or four wizards, were subsequently burnt at 
Edinburgh as his accomplices. In the century following, in 
1532, a woman of rank and beauty, Janet Douglas, Lady Glam- 
mis, was charged with having caused the death of her first hus- 
band by sorcery, but escaped, to be tried and burnt, amid the gen- 
eral commiseration of her countrymen, for a similar crime which 
she was said to have attempted against the person of James V., 
with a view to the restoration of the Douglas family, the object of 
James's special hatred. In these executions, death v/as the pun- 
ishment rather of the treason than of the sorcery ; and the first 
simple case of the latter which we find in the records of the high 
court of justiciary in Scotland, is that of Agnes Mullikine, alias 
Bessie Boswell, of Dumfermling, who, in 1563, was "banished 
and exiled" for witchcraft, a mild sentence which seldom occurs 
in subsequent times. The records just alluded to, published a 
few years ago by Mr. Robert Pitcairn, will be our chief guide in 
the history of sorcery in Scotland. 

In Scotland, the witches received their power, not from the 
evil one, but from the " fairy folk," with whom, at least until a 
late period, their connection was more innocent, and was char- 
acterized by none of the disgusting particularities which distin- 
guished the proceedings of their sisters on the continent. Ac- 
cording to an old and popular ballad^as ancient perhaps as the 
fourteenth century — the celebrated Thomas of Ercildowne ob- 
tained his supposed skill in prophecy from his connection with 
the queen of faery. In 1576, a very extraordinary case was 
ti'ied before the high court, in which the chief actress was known 
as Bessie Dunlop, a native of thes county of Ayr, and wife of a 
cottager named Andro Jak. In her confession, this woman sta- 
led that she was one day going from her own house to the yard 
of Monkcastell, driving her cows to the pasture, and weeping 
" for her cow that was dead," her husband and child that 
were both lying ill of an epidemic, and herself newly risen from 
child-bed, when a strange man met her by the way, and saluted 
her Avith the words, " Gude day, Bessie !" She returned his 
salutation, and in answer to his inquiries, told him of her trou- 
bles, upon which he informed her, that her child, as well as the 
sick cow, and two of her sheep, would die, but that her " gude 
man" should soon recover, all of which took place as he fore- 
told. She described her interrogator as " ane honest wele-el- 
derlie man, gray bairdit \hearded\, and had ane gray coilt with 
Lumbart slevis of the auld fassoun ; ane pair of gray brekis 
\breeches\, and quhyte schankis, gartanit abone the kne ; ane 



THOME REfD AND BESSIE DUNLOP. 105 

black bonet oii his heid, cloise behind and plane befoir, with 
silkin laissis drawin throw the lippis thairof ; and ane quhyte 
wand in his hand." This personage told her at last that he was 
one Thome Reid, " quha diet [cliedj, at Pinkye." (Sept. 10, 
1547.) And this account was confirmed by the manner in which 
he disappeared through the yard of Monkcastell : " I thocht he 
gait in at ane narroware hoill of the dyke, nor ony erdlie man 
culd haif gane throw ; and swa I was sumthing fleit [aghasl].^^ 
It appears that Thome Reid had been a turned-off servant of the 
laird of Blair, and Bessie Dunlop was once sent on a message 
to his son, who inherited his name, and had succeeded to his 
place in the household of the laird of Blair, and who fully con- 
firmed Thome's story, that he had gone to the battle of Pinkye, 
and fallen in that disastrous conflict. 

The next time Thome Reid appeared to Bessie, as she was 
going between her own house and the thorn of Dawmstarnok, 
and he then declared more openly his ultimate designs. After 
remaining some time with her, Thome asked her pointedly if 
she v/ould belief in him, to which she replied with great naivete, 
" She would believe in anybody who did her good." Thome 
had hitherto spoken like a good Christian, and at their first in- 
terview he had addressed her in the name of the Blessed Virgin, 
but now, encouraged by her answer, he boldly proposed to her 
that she should " deny her Christendom, and the faith she took at 
the baptismal font," in return for Avhich she should have goods 
and horses and cows in abundance, besides other advantages. 
This, however, she' refused indignantly, and her tempter went 
away, " something angry" with her. 

Thome's visits generally occurred at mid-day, not at the still 
hour of night, and he seemed little embarrassed by the presence 
of other company. Shortly after the interview just mentioned, 
he visited her in her own house, where she was in company 
with her husband and three tailors, and, unseen by these, he 
took her by the apron and led her to the door, and she followed 
him up to the " hill-end," and there he told her to remain quiet 
and speak not, whatever she might hear and see. She then 
advanced a little, and suddenly saw twelve persons, eight women 
and four men — " the men were clad in gentlemen's clothing, and 
the women had all plaids round about them, and were very 
seemdy like to see, and Thome was Avith them." They bade her 
sit down, and said, "Welcome, Bessie, wilt thou go with us?" 
but as she had been warned, she returned no answer, and, after 
holding a consultation among themselves, which she did not hear, 



106 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

they disappeared in a " hideous" whirlwind. Shortly afterward 
Thome returned, and' told her the persons she had seen were 
the " good wights," who dwelt in the court of Elfen, who came 
there to invite her to go with them, and he repeated the invita- 
tion very pressingly, but she answered that " she saw no profit 
to gang that kind of gates, unless she knew wherefore." 

Then he said, " Seest thou not me, worth meat and worth 
clothes, and good enough like in person ?" and he promised to 
make her far better off than ever she was. 

Her answer, however, was still the same — she dwelt with 
her own husband and " bairns," and could not leave them — and 
so he " began to be very crabbed with her," and told her that if 
she continued in that mind she would get little good of him. 
His anger, however, appears to have soon subsided, and he con- 
tinued to come at her call, and give her his advice and assistance, 
always treating her with respect, for she declared that the great- 
est liberty he had taken with her was to draw her by the apron 
when he would persuade her to go with him to fairy-land. She 
said that she sometimes savf him in public places, as in Edin- 
burgh streets on a market-day, and that on one occasion, when 
she was " gone a-field" v/ith her husband to Leith, she went to 
tie her nag to the stake by Restalrig loch, and there came sud- 
denly a company of riders by " that made a din as though heaven 
and earth had gone together," and immediately they rode into 
the loch with a " hideous rumble." Thome came to her and 
told her that it was the " good wights," who were taking their 
ride in this world. On another occasion Thome told her the 
reason -of his visit to her ; he called to her remembrance that 
one day when she was ill in child-bed, and near her time of de- 
livery, a stout woman came in to her, and sat down on the form 
beside her, and asked a drink of her, and she immediately gave 
it; this he said was his mistress, the queen of Elfen, v/ho had 
commanded him to wait upon her and " do her good." 

The whole extent of Bessie Dunlop's witchcraft consisted in 
curing diseases and recovering stolen property, which she did 
by the agency of her unearthly visiter, who gave her medicines, 
or showed her how to prepare them. Some of her statements 
appear to have been confirmed by other witnesses ; and however 
we may judge of the connection between Thome Reid and Bes- 
sie Dunlop, it is rendered certain by the entry in the court 
records, that the unfortunate woman was^convict and byrnt." 

From this time cases of witchcraft occur more frequently in 
the judicial records, and they become exceedingly numerous as 



ALISON PEIRSOUN. 107 

we approach the end of the century, still, however, distinguished 
by their purely Scottish character. A remarkable case is re- 
corded in the memorable year 1588, which has several points of 
resemblance with the story of Bessie Dunlop. The heroine was 
Alison Peirsoun, of Byrehill, whose connection with " faerie" 
originated with her kinsman, William Sympsoune, a " great 
scholar and doctor of medicine." He was born at Stirling, his 
father being the king's smith, but he " vs^as taken away from his 
father by a man of Egypt, a giant, while but a child, who led 
him away to Egypt with him, vi^here he remained by the space 
of twelve years before he came home again." During this time 
his father, who also appears to have had a hankering after un- 
lawful knowledge, died " for opening a priest's book and look- 
ing upon it." On his return home, Alison Peirsoun became 
intimate with her kinsman, who cured her of certain diseases, 
until, as it would appear, he died also. One day, as she stated, 
being in Grange Muir, with the people that passed to the muir 
(moor), she lay down sick and alone, when she was suddenly 
accosted by a man clad in green clothes, who told her if she 
would be faithful, he would do her good. She was at first ter- 
rified, and cried for help, but no one hearing her, she addressed 
him in God's name, upon which he immediately disappeared. 
But he soon afterward appeared to her again, accompanied witli 
" many men and women," and she was obliged to go with them, 
and they had with them "piping and merriment, and good 
cheer ;" and she was thus carried to Lothian, where they found 
puncheons of wine with drinking-cups. From this time she 
constantly haunted the company of the " good neighbors" 
(fairies), and the queen of Elfen, at whose court she was a 
frequent visiter, and she boasted that she had many friends there, 
among whom was the aforesaid William Sympsoune, who was 
most familiar with her, and from whom chiefly she derived her 
skill in curing diseases. She declared that her familiarity with 
the fairies was so great, that she was allowed to see them " make 
their salves with pans and fires, and that they gathered their 
herbs before sun-rising, as she did." The archbishop of St. 
Andrews, a scholar and profound divine, had condescended to 
seek the assistance of this woman in a dangerous illness, for 
which he was made an object of severe satire by his political 
enemies ; she caused him to eat a sodden fowl, and take a quart 
of claret wine mixed with her drugs, which the worthy prelate 
drank off at two draughts I Alison, in the course of her exam- 
ination, gave many curious anecdotes of the fairy people, with 



108 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

whom she was sometimes on better terms than at others ; among 
them she saw several of her acquaintance, who had been carried 
to Elfland, when their friends imagined they were dead and 
gone to heaven ; and she learned from her kinsman, Sympsoune, 
that a tithe of them was yearly given up to hell, and had been 
warned by him from time to time not to go with them at certain 
periods, lest she should be made one of the number. This wo- 
man also was convicted and burnt [convicta et combusta). 

The next case, or rather two cases, of witchcraft in the Scot- 
tish annals, is of a more fearful and more criminal character than 
either of the preceding. The chief persons implicated were 
Katherine Munro lady Fowlis, wife of the chief of the clan of 
Munro, and Hector Munro, the son of the baron of Fowlis by a 
former wife. The lady Fowlis was by birth Katharine Ross of 
Balnagown ; and, in consequence of family quarrels and intrigues, 
she had laid a plot to make away with Robert Munro, her hus- 
band's eldest son, in order that his widow might be married to 
her brother, George Ross, laird of Balnagown, preparatory to 
which it was also necessary to effect the death of the young lady 
Balnagown. The open manner in which the proceedings of 
lady Fowlis were carried on, affords a remarkable picture of the 
barbarous state of society among the Scottish clans at this pe- 
rked. Among her chief agents were Agnes Roy, Christiane 
Ross, and Marjory Neyne Mac Aliester, the latter better known 
by the name of Loskie Loncart, and all three described as " no- 
torious witches ;" another active individual was named William 
Mac Gillevordame ; and there were a number of other subordi- 
nate persons of very equivocal characters. As early as the mid- 
summer of 1576, it appears from the trial that Agnes Roy was 
sent to bring Loskie Loncart to consult with lady Fowlis, who 
was advised " to go into the hills to speak with the Elf-folk," 
and learn from them if Robert Munro and lady Balnagown 
would die, and if the laird of Balnagown would marry Robert's 
widow ; and about the same time, these two women made clay 
images of the two individuals who were to die, for the purpose 
of bewitching them. Poison was also adopted as a surer means 
of securing their victims, and the cook of the laird of Balnagown 
was bribed to their interests. The deadly ingredients were ob- 
tained by William Mac Gillevordame, at Aberdeen, under pre- 
tence of buying poison for rats ; it was administered by the cook 
just mentioned, in a dish sent to the lady Balnagown's table, and 
another accomplice, who was present, declared "that it was the 
sairest and maist cruel! sicht that evir scho saw, seing the vomit 



LADY FOWLIS AND ROBERT MTJNEO. 109 

and vexacioun that was on the young lady Balnagown and hir 
company." However, although the victim was thrown into a 
miserable and long-lasting illness, the poison did not produce 
immediate death, as was expected. From various points in the 
accusation, it appears that the conspirators were actively em- 
ployed in devising means of effecting their purpose from the pe- 
riod mentioned above till the Easter of the following year, by 
which time the deadly designs of the lady Fowlis had become 
much more comprehensive, and she aimed at no less than the 
destruction of all the former family of her husband, that their in- 
heritance might fall to her own children. In May, 1577, Wil- 
liam Mac Gillevordame was asked to procure a greater quantity 
of poison, the preceding dose having been insufficient ; but he re- 
fused, unless her brother, the laird of Balnagown, were made 
privy to it ; a difficulty which was soon got over, and it appears 
that the laird was, to a certain degree, acquainted with their pro- 
ceedings. A potion of a much more deadly character was now 
prepared, and two individuals, the nurse of the lady Fowlis and 
a boy, were killed by accidentally tasting of it ; but we are not 
told if any of the intended victims fell a sacrifice. The con- 
spirators had now recourse again to witchcraft, and in the June 
of 1577, a man obtained for the lady Fowlis an " elf arrow-head," 
for which she gave him four shillings. The " elf arrow-head" 
was nothing more than one of those small rude weapons of flint, 
belonging to a primeval state of society, which are often met 
with in turning up the soil, and which the superstitious peasantry 
of various countries have looked upon as the oflensive arms of 
fairies and witches. On the 2d and 6th of July, lady Fowlis and 
her accomplices held two secret meetings ; at the first they made 
an image of butter, to represent Robert Munro, and having placed 
it against the wall of the chamber, Loskie Loncart shot at it 
eight times with the elf arrow-head, but always missed it ; and 
at the second meeting they made a figure of clay to represent the 
same person, at which Loskie shot twelve times, but with no bet- 
ter success, in spite of all their incantations. This seems to 
have been a source of great disappointment, for they had brought 
fine linen cloth, in which the figures, if struck by the elf arrow- 
head, were to have been wrapped, and so buried in the earth at 
a place v/hich seems to have been consecrated by superstitious 
feeling, and this ceremony was to have insured Robert Mun- 
ro's death. In August, another elf arrow-head was obtained, and 
toward Hallowmass another meeting was held, and tw^o figures 
of clay made_, one for Robert Munro and the other for the ladv ; 

10 



110 SORCERY AND MAGIC, 

lady Fowlis shot two shots at lady Balnagown, and Loskie Lon- 
cart shot three at Robert Munro, but neither of them were suc- 
cessful, and the two images were accidentally broken, and thus 
the charm was destroyed. They now prepared to try poison 
again, but Christiane Ross, who had been present at the last 
meeting, was arrested toward the end of November, and, being 
put to the torture, made a full confession, which was followed by 
the seizure of some of her accomplices, several of whom, as well 
as Christiane Ross, were " convicted and burnt." The lady 
Fowlis tied to Caithness and remained there nine months, after 
which she was allowed to return home. Her husband died in 
1588, and was succeeded by Robert Munro, who appears to 
have revived the old charge of witchcraft against his stepmother ; 
for in 1589 he obtained a commission for the examination of 
witches, among whose names were those of Lady Fowlis and 
some of her surviving accomplices. She appears to have ward- 
ed off the danger by her influence and money for some months, 
until July 22, 1590, when she was brought to her trial, her ac- 
cuser being Hector Munro. This trial offered one of the first 
instances of acquittal of the charge of sorcery, and it has ^eea 
observed that there are reasons for thinking the case was 
brought before a jury packed for that purpose. 

It is somewhat remarkable, that while the lady Fowlis was 
thus attempting the destruction of her step-children, they were 
trying to effect, by the same means, the death of her own son. 
Immediately after her acquittal, on the same day, the 22d of 
July, 1590, Hector Munro (her accuser) was put on his trial be- 
■ for a jury composed of nearly the same persons, for practisirsg 
the same crime of sorcery. It is stated in the charge that, when 
his brother Robert Munro had been grievously ill in the summar 
of 1588, Hector Munro had assembled "three notorious and 
common witches," to devise means to cure him, and had given 
harbor to them several days, until he was compelled to dismiss 
them by his father, who threatened to apprehend them. Subse- 
quent to this, in January, 1588 (that is 1589 according to the 
modern reckoning). Hector became suddenly ill, upon which he 
sent one of his men to seek a woman named Marion Mac Inga- 
ruch, " ane of the maist notorious and rank witches in all this 
realme," and she was brought to the house in which he was 
lying sick. After long consultation, and having given him 
" three drinks of water out of three stones which she had," she 
declared that there was no remedy for him, unless the principal 
man of his blood should suffer death for him. They then held 



WIERl) PRACTICES OF THE MUNROS. Ill 

further counsel, and came at last to the conclusion that the per- 
son who must thus be his substitute was George Munro, the 
eldest son of the lady Fowlis, whose trial has just been de- 
scribed. The ceremonies which followed are some of the most 
extraordinary in the whole range of the history of these dark 
superstitions. Messengers were sent out to seek George Munro, 
the intended victim, in every direction, and he, " as a loving 
brother," suspecting no evil, came to where Hector lay, on the 
fifth day. By the express direction of the witch, the latter was 
to allow none to enter the house until after his brother's arrival ; 
he was to receive his brother in silence, give him his left hand 
and take him by the right hand, and not speak till he had first 
spoken to him. Hector Munro followed these instructions to 
the letter; George Munro was astonished at the coldness of his 
reception, compared with the pressing manner in which he had 
been invited, and he remained in the room an hour before he 
uttered a word. George at last asked him how he did, to which 
Hector replied, " The better that you have come to visit me," 
and then relapsed into his former silence. This, it appears, 
was a part of the spell. At one o'clock the same night, Marion 
Mac Ingaruch, the presiding sorceress, with certain of her ac- 
complices, provided themselves with spades, and went to a 
piece of earth at the seaside, lying between the boundaries of 
the lands of two proprietors, and dug a grave proportionate to 
the size of the sick man, and took off' the sod. She then re- 
turned to the house, and carefully instructed each of the persons 
concerned in the part they were to perform in the ceremonies 
which were to transfer the fate of Hector Munro to his brother 
George. 

The friends of Hector, who were in the secret, represented that 
if George should die suddenly, suspicioa would fall upon them 
all, and their lives would be in danger, and wished her to delay 
his death " a space ;" and she took on hand to " warrant him unto 
the 17th day of April next thereafter." They then took the sick 
man from his bed, and carried him in a pair of blankets to the 
grave, the assistants being forbidden to utter a word until the 
witch and his foster-mother, named Christiana Neill Dayzill, had 
first spoken with " their master, the devil." Hector was then 
placed in the grave, and the green sod laid over him, and held 
down upon him with staves, and the chief witch took her stand 
beside him. The foster-mother, leading a young lad by the hand, 
then ran the breadth of nine ridges, and on her return inquired 
of the hag " which was her choice ;" to which she replied that 



112 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

" Hector was her choice to live, and his brother George to die 
for him." This strange form of incantation was repeated thrice, 
and then the patient was taken from the grave, and carried home 
to his bed in the same silence which had distinguished the first 
part of the ceremony. The effects of an exposure to the cold 
of a January night in the north, on a sick man, must have been 
very serious; but Hector recovered soon afterward, and in the 
month of April, as foretold, George Munro was seized with a 
mortal disease, under which he lingered till the month of June, 
when he died. Hector Munro took the witch into great favor, 
carried her to the house of his uncle at " Kildrummadyis," where 
she was "entertained as if she had been his spouse,. and gave 
her such pre-eminence in the country that there was none that 
durst offend her, and gave her the keeping of his sheep, to color 
the matter." After the death of George, the affair was whispered 
abroad, and an order was issued for the arrest of the witch, but 
she was concealed by Hector Munro, until information was 
given by Lady Fowlis, that she was in the house at Fowlis. 
When subjected to an examination, and no doubt to the torture, 
she made a confession, and was publicly burnt. Her confession 
was the ground of the charge against Hector Munro, who, like 
his step-mother, was acquitted. 

The trials of Lady Fowlis and Hector Munro, appear to have 
caused much excitement, and other cases of witchcraft followed 
with fearful rapidity in different parts of the country, to such a 
degree that they movQd the learned superstition of the king, who 
from this period began to take an extraordinary interest in prose- 
cutions for crimes of this description. King James's example 
was not lost upon his subjects, and not only did they show re- 
doubled diligence in seeking out offenders, but probably cases 
were made up to gratify his curiosity, until a fearful conspiracy 
between the hags and the evil one was discovered, of which the 
king was to have been the chief victim, and which will be rela- 
ted at full in our next chapter. The interference of King James 
not only marks an epoch in the history of sorcery in Scotland, 
but it had also an influence in modifying the belief by the intro- 
duction of the scientific demonology of France and Germany. 
In the conspiracy to which I have just alluded, we shall see 
many foreign notions mixed with the native superstitions. 

For two or three subsequent years, the records of the high 
court are unfortunately missing, but in 1596, we find several 
prosecutions for the practice of witchcraft, of which pe^rsons of 
high rank believed themselves, or were believed to be, the vie- 



THE WITCHES OF HADDINGTON. 113 

tims. On the 24th of June, John Stewart, the master of Ork- 
ney, was accused, on the confession of certam witches who had 
previously been condemned and burnt, of having employed them 
to compass the death of Patrick, earl of Orkney ; but he alleged 
in his defence that the confessions had been extorted by extreme 
torture, and had afterward been contradicted by the sufferers as 
they were carried to the'stake, and he was acquitted by the jury. 
On the 30th of October, a woman named Alison Jollie was tried 
for the same crime of employing a witch to cause the death of a 
woman with whom she had quairelled, grounded on the confession 
of the witch, and was also acquitted. Another woman, named 
Christian Stewart, tried on the 27th of November, for compas- 
sing the death of one of the powerful family of the Ruthvens by 
witchcraft, was less fortunate, for she was judged " to be tane to 
the castle hill, and thair to be burnt." 

In 1597, we have another case bearing some resemblance to 
those of Bessie Dunlop and Alison Peirsoun. The healing art 
had been, during the middle ages, practised by all sorts of quacks 
and unskilful pretenders, who made use of certain preparations 
of herbs and some other ingredients, but depended more for their 
success on the superstitious observances with which they were 
gathered, prepared, or applied. In order to gain more credit for 
their remedies, they pretended to receive their knowledge from 
an intercourse with the spiritual world. It was a part of the ed- 
ucation of every good housewife in former days to understand 
the use of medicines, and most women were, more or less, ac- 
quainted with the mode of preparing them. Most of the reme- 
dies which are mentioned in the trials as used by Bessie Dun- 
lop, Alison Peirsoun, and others, are found in the old medieval 
receipt-books. On the 12th of November, in the year last men- 
tioned, four miserable women, Janet Stewart, Christian Lewing- 
stoun, Bessie Aiken, and Christian Saidler, were brought to their 
trial for various alleged acts of witchcraft. Christian Lewing- 
stoun was accused of having bewitched a baker of Haddington, 
by burying a small bag full of worsted thread, hairs, and nails of 
men, and other articles, under his stairs, then pretending that the 
witchcraft was the work of another, and undertaking to relieve 
him from it. In this we can see little more than a dishonest trick 
to extort money; but she pretended to further knowledge, and 
the baker's wife being with child at the time, she told her that 
she would give birth to a boy which happened accordingly. 
When asked whence she derived her knowledge, she said that 
she had a daughter who was carried away by the " fairy folk," 

10* 



114 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

and from her she had her knowledge. She was accused after 
this, with the other women as accomplices, of the superstitious 
treatment of various sick persons, besides some other transac- 
tions not more honest than her treatment of the baker of Had- 
dington. Janet Stewart was on one occasion, called to a wo- 
man who was " deadly sick ;" she took off the sick woman's shirt 
and her " mutche" (cap), and carried them to a stream which ran 
toward the south, and washed them in it, and made the patient 
put them on dripping wet, and said thrice over her, " In the name 
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," and then put a 
red-hot iron in the water, and then burnt straw at each " newke" 
of the bed. This was a primitive sort of " cold-water cure." 
She healed several women of another disease, by passing them 
thrice through a garland of green woodbine, which she afterward 
cut in nine pieces, and cast in the fire. Woodbine appears to 
have been a favorite remedy in a variety of cases. Bessie Aiken 
cured most of her patients by passing them nine times through a 
" girth" of woodbine, in the name of the three persons of the 
Holy Trinity. For a woman laboring under a pain in the loins, 
she took a decoction of red nettles and herb Alexander, and bathed 
the part with it, and then boiled herb Alexander with fresh but- 
ter, and rubbed her with it, and then passed her nine times 
through the girth of woodbine, at three several times, a space of 
twenty-four hours being allowed to elapse between each. Other 
similar practices are recounted ; and the four women werre final- 
ly condemned to be taken to the castle hill at Edinburgh, and 
there to be strangled at a stake till they died, and their bodies to 
be burnt to ashes ; a sentence which was duly executed on three 
of them. But Bessie Aiken pleaded that she was with child, and 
she was allowed to languish in prison until the 15th of August, 
1598, when the king, moved with, for him, an unusual degree of 
clemency, in consideration that she was " delyverit of ane in- 
fant, and lies sustenit lang puneischment be famine and inipreis- 
ment," commuted her original sentence for perpetual banishment. 
We have thus traced the history of witchcraft in Scotland to 
the close of the sixteenth century, down to which time it had 
preserved its national character, altogether diff'ering from the su- 
perstitions which prevailed on the continent in the same age. In 
Scotland, witchcraft was an object of more universal and unhes- 
itating belief than in almost any other country, and it obtained 
greater authority from the circumstance that so many people of 
rank at different periods had recourse to it as a means of gratify- 
ing revenge or ambition. There were sorcerers among the mi- 



KING JAMES AND THE WITCHES OF LOTHIAN. 115 

nor agents in tlie mysterious conspiracies of the earl of Gowry, 
which have given such celebrity in Scottish history to the last 
year of the century. The narrative which will occupy our next 
chapter, will exhibit in a remarkable manner the sentiments of 
King James, who appears to have carried his hatred of witches 
with him into England, and with his reign in the latter country 
began the darkest period of the history of witchcraft in the south- 
ern parts of the island. In a future chapter, we shall have to re- 
turn to the superstitions of Scotland, which took a still wider and 
more fearful form in the seventeenth century, when they were 
beginning to subside in other countries. 



CHAPTER X. 

KING JAMES AND THE WITCHES OF •LOTHIAN. 

In the year 1589, surrounded by political jealousies abroad, 
and harassed by the turbulence of his subjects at home, James 
VI. of Scotland came to the resolution of marrying Anne of 
Denmark, and the earl-marshal left Scotland on the 18th of June 
on a mission to Copenhagen, to arrange the contract. In July, 
the marriage was celebrated by proxy, and in September, the new 
queen of Scotland left her father's court, and embarked with the 
earl-marshal and his suite for her adopted country ; but they had 
hardly left the port when they were assailed by a tempest, which 
carried them so far from their course that they with difficulty 
reached Upsal in Norway, where a continuance of tempestuous 
weather threatened to detain them till the setting in of winter. 
King James, impatient of delay, summoned up more courage than 
he had ever shown before, and on the 22d of October, set off in 
search of his wife, whom he found still at Upsal where they 
were again married, and with whom he returned to Copenhagen, 
and remained there during the winter. On the reappearance 
of spring he left Denmark, and after a rough voyage, landed with 
his queen at Leith, on the 1st of May, 1590. 

The obstinate hostility of the weather toward James and his 
new consort coinciding with political hatred among a portion of 
his subjects, gave rise to strange reports, and at last a conspiracy 
of an unearthly character was brought to light, by the agency of 
which it was universally believed that the royal seafarer had 



116 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

been persecuted. The earl of Bothwell, the especial organ of 
the Romish party, was said to have been its instigator, and on 
this and other charges he was committed to ward, from which 
he broke toward the end of June, 1591, and took refuge among 
his friends in the more inaccessible parts of the north. He was 
himself believed to be a skilful necromancer, and held frequent 
communication with witches. 

The manner in which this extraordinary affair was discovered 
is involved in some obscurity ; but, according to the common 
story, the first divulger of the secret was a young woman named 
Geillis Duncan. This woman was servant in the house of Da- 
vid Seytoun, deputy-bailiff of the little town of Tranent, on the 
shores of the frith of Forth, about nine miles to the east of 
Edinburgh ; and on a sudden she became celebrated for her ex- 
traordinary skill in curing diseases, and for doing other things 
which gave rise to the belief that the agency by which she 
worked was something more than natural. Her master's sus- 
picions on this subject were strengthened by the discovery, that 
Geillis was in the habit of secretly leaving the house and absent- 
ing herself every other night. He thereupon questioned her in 
private, but obtaining no satisfactory answer, he presumed so far 
upon his municipal ofiice, as to call in some of his acquaintance, 
and in their presence put her to most severe tortures. But even 
this had no effect ; and they then examined every part of her body 
in order to discover the devil's mark. For it was one article of the 
belief in witchcraft, that, after the compact between the witch and 
the evil one had been completed, the latter sucked some part of 
his victim's body, and left his mark, and until this mark was dis- 
covered, his influence was unabated, and he hindered confession. 
The mark was most commonly placed on a part covered with 
hair, that it might be more easily concealed : and hence one of 
the first processes in the examination of a witch was one most 
shocking to her feelings of modesty, that of shaving her body. 
In the case of Geillis Duncan, the fiend's mark was found in the 
fore-part of her throat, upon which she confessed that she effected 
her cures by means of witchcraft. She was now committed to 
prison, and, after a short confinement, made a more full confes- 
sion, which implicated a number of persons living in different 
parts of the district of Lothian, and led to the arrest of not less 
than thirty presumed sorcerers, whose examinations brought to 
light the conspiracy above alluded to. The more remai'kable of 
the persons thus placed under arrest were Dr. Fian, otherwise 
named John Cunningham, Agnes Sampsoun, Euphame Mackal- 



DR. FIAN. 117 

zeane, and Barbara Napier. In the account which these persons 
gave of their communications with the tempter, we find many 
incidents apparently new to the popular mythology of Scotland, 
but which recur over and over again in the witchcraft stories of 
later days. 

John Fian, one of the chief persons compromised by Geillis 
Duncan's confession, was a schoolmaster of Tranent, a man above 
the ordinary stamp of sorcerers at this period, who appears, at 
the time of these transactions, to have taken up his residence in 
the neighboring township of Preston-Pans, the same place which 
obtained so much celebrity in later Scottish history. Dr. Fian 
gave the following account of the origin of his acquaintance with 
the devil. He lodged at Tranent, in the house of one Thomas Trura- 
bill, who had given him great offence by neglecting to " sparge," or 
whitewash, his chamber, as he had promised ; Fian was lying in 
his bed, " musing and thinking how he might be revenged of the 
said Thomas," when the devil suddenly made his appearance, 
clad in white raiment, and said to him, " Will ye be my servant, 
and adore me and all my servants, and ye shall never Avant 1" 

The doctor assented to the terms, and, at the suggestion of 
the evil one, he revenged himself on Trumbill by burning his 
house. The second night the devil again appeared to him in 
white raiment, and put his mark upon him with a rod. Subse- 
quently, Fian was found in his chamber, as it were, in a trance, 
during which he said that his spirit was carried " over many 
mountains," and as it appeared all over the world. From this 
time he was present at all the nightly conventions held in the 
district of Lothian, and rose so high in Satan's favor, that the 
fiend appointed him his " registrar and secretary." His first 
visit to these conventions was at the church at North Berwick, 
about fourteen miles along the coast from Preston-Pans, a favor- 
ite meeting-place of the witches. He was transported thither 
from his bed at Preston-Pans, " as if he had been skimming 
across the earth ;" and he found a number of Satan's " servants," 
with a candle burning blue in the middle of them. Their master 
stood in a pulpit " making a sermon of doubtful speeches," the 
effect of which was that they were not to fear him, " though he 
were grim" (he seems to have appeared in a different character 
from that in which he first presented himself to Fian) ; telling 
them that " he had many servants, who should never want, and 
should ail nothing, so long as their hairs were on, and that they 
should never let any tears fall from their eyes." It was a common 
article of belief that witches could not shed tears . He further ex- 



113 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

horted them that " they should spare not to do evil, and to eat, 
drink, and be blithe ;" and he made them do him homage by kiss- 
ing his posteriors. Fian appears to have been an ill-disposed 
person, and well inclined to put in practice Satan's exhortations. 
The power which he obtained by his connection with the tempt- 
er, was always employed to work mischief, or for the indulgence 
of his wicked passions. He confessed on his trial that he had 
seduced a widow named Margaret Spens, under promise of mar- 
riage, and then deserted her. He was popularly accused of 
having attempted to force to his will a virtuous maiden, the sister 
of one of his scholars, by charms which can not well be described 
here, but which were thwarted by the ingenuity of her mother, 
and made to throw disgrace on the designing sorcerer. While 
residing at Tranent, Fian one night supped at the miller's, some 
distance from the town, and as it was late before he left, was 
conveyed home on a horse by one of the miller's men ; it being 
dark, he raised up, by his unearthly agency, four candles on the 
horse's ears, and one on the staff which his companion carried, 
which were so bright that they made the night appear as light 
as day ; but the man was terrified to such a degree, that on his 
return home he dropped down dead. This was told by Fian 
himself on his examination. 

Agnes Sampsoun acted an especially prominent part in these 
transactions. She is described in the indictment as residing in 
Nether Keith, was commonly known by the title of the wise 
wife of Keith, and seems to have used her art chiefly in curing 
diseases, although she was accused of having inflicted serious 
injuries on those who provoked her. Archbishop Spotswode de- 
scribes her as a woman, not of the base and ignorant sort of 
witches, but matron-like, grave, and settled in her answers. 
Her examination was long, and her confession, by what is pre- 
served, appears to have been the wildest and most extraordinary 
of them all ; but it would take too much of our space to give more 
than a sample of them. 

She said that she had learned her art of knowing and healing 
diseases from her father ; that the first time she began to serve 
the devil was after the death of her husband, when he appeared 
to her in the likeness of a man, and commanded her to acknowl- 
edge him as her master, and to renounce Christ. This she 
agreed to, being poor, and the tempter promising her riches for 
herself and her children. He generally appeared to her in the 
likeness of a dog, of which she asked questions, and received 
answers. On one occasion, when she was sent for to the old 



EUPHAME MACKALZEANE. 119 

lady Edmestoime, who lay sick, she went into the garden at 
night and called the devil by the name of Elva, who came in 
over the dike, in the likeness of a dog, and came so near to her 
that she was frightened, upon v/hich she charged him, " on the 
law he believed on," to come no nearer. She then asked him 
if the lady would recover, and he told her that " her days were 
gone." He then asked where the gentlewomen, the lady's 
daughters, were. She told him they w^ere to meet her there, on 
which he said that he would have one of them. Agnes said that 
she would hinder him, on which he went away howling, and 
concealed himself in the well, where he remained till after sup- 
per. The gentlewomen came into the garden when supper was 
over, whereupon the dog rushed out, terrified them all, and seized 
one of the daughters, the lady Torsenye, and attempted to drag 
her into the well to drown her, but Agues also seized hold of 
her, and proved stronger than the devil, who thereupon disap- 
peared with a terrible howl. On another occasion, Agnes, with 
Geillis Duncan and other witches, wishing to be revenged on 
David Seytoun (Geillis Duncan's master), met on the bridge at 
Foulstruthir, and threw a cord into the river, and Agnes Samp- 
soun cried, " Hail, holoa !" The end of the cord which was in 
the water became immediately heavy, and when they drew it 
out, the devil came upat the end of it, and asked if they had all 
been good servants. He then gave them a charm, which was to 
affect David Seytoun and his goods, but it was accidentally 
averted, and fell upon another person. The lady of whom we 
are now speaking seems to have had a little of the evil one in 
her, for she sometimes quarrelled with the devil himself. 

Euphame (Euphemia) Mackalzeane, one of the persons most 
deeply implicated in these charges, was a lady of rank in soci- 
ety, the only daughter and heiress of Thomas Mackalzeane lord 
Cliftounhall, one of the senators of the College of Justice, a dis- 
tinguished scholar, lawyer, and statesman. She appears to have 
been led into associating with the base people concerned in this 
conspiracy, by her devotion to the Romish religion and to the 
party of the earl of Bothwell. She confessed that she had first 
been made a witch by the means of an Irishwoman " with a 
fallen nose ;" and that to make herself " more perfect and well- 
skilled in the said art of witchcraft," she had caused another 
witch, dwelling in St. Ninian's Row (in Edinburgh), to " inau- 
gurate" her in the said craft, with " the girth of ane grit bikar," 
turnmg the same " oft round her head and neck, and oft-times 
round her head." She was charged with having procured the 



120 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

deaths of her husband, her father-in-law, and various other per- 
sons, by means of poison and sorcery. She had become ac- 
quainted with Agnes Sampsoun at the time of the birth of her 
first son, when she applied to her to ease her of her pains in 
childbirth, which she did by transferring them to a dog, which 
ran away, and was never heard of afterward. At the birth of 
her second son, Agnes Sampsoun in the same way transferred 
her pains to a cat. 

Barbara Napier was also a woman of some rank ; but the 
others were in general persons of very low condition. A man, 
nicknamed Grey Meill (Gray Meal) whom Spots wode describes 
as " ane auld sely pure plowman," was keeper of the door at 
their conventions. 

The extensive scene of the operations of this society em- 
braced the sea as well as the land. I have already stated that 
the church of North Berwick was their favorite place of meet- 
ing. Agnes Sampsoun confessed that, one AUhallow Eve " shee 
was accompanied with a great many other witches, to the num- 
ber of two hundredth, and that all they together went to sea, each 
one in a riddle or cive, and went into the same very substantial- 
ly, with flaggons t)f wine, making merrie and drinking by the 
way, in the same riddles or cives,to the kirke of North Barrick, 
in Lowthian ; and that after they had landed, took handes on the 
lande, and daunced this reill or short daunce, singing all with 
one voice, 

" ' Commer goe ye before, commer goe ye, 
Gif ye wall not goe before, commer let me.' 

At which time she confessed that this Geillis Duncane did goe 
before them, playing this reill or daunce, upon a small trumpe, 
called a Jewes trumpe, until they entered into the kirk of North 
Barrick." On one occasion, Fian, Agnes Sampoun, an active 
wizard named Robert Griersoun, and others, left Griersoun's 
house, at Preston, in a boat, and went out to sea to a " tryst," 
with another witch, and entered a ship, and had "good wine 
and ale" therein, after which, as was their usual custom, they 
sank the ship and all that was in it, and returned home. On 
another occasion, as Agnes Sampsoun confessed, they sailed out 
from North Berwick in a boat like a chimney, the devil passing 
before them like a rick of hay, and entered a ship called the 
" Grace of God,"Avhere they had abundance of wine and " other 
good cheer," and when they came away the fiend raised " an 
evil wind," he being under the ship, and caused the ship to 
perish ; and Agnes said that she gave on this occasion twenty 



MEETING OF WITCHES. 121 

shillings to Greg Meill for his attendance, which would seem 
to imply that they had taken the ship's money. On one of their 
voyages, in the summer of 1589, Dr. Fian stated that the fiend 
informed them of the leak which subsequently endangered the 
queen's ship, when she took refuge in Norway. Subsequent to 
this, when the queen was on her v.'ay from Denmark, a conven- 
tion was held at the " Brumehoillis," where the whole party 
went to sea in riddles, Robert Griersoun, above-mentioned, be- 
ing their " admiral and master-man," and they again entered a 
ship and made merry ; and finished by throwing a dog over- 
board, which not only made the ship turn over and sink, but 
raised a storm which helped to drive the queen back. 

This latter event, however, was effected by more imposing 
ceremonies. A meeting was held in a Webster's house, at Pres- 
ton-Pans, at which were present Agnes Sampsoun, John Fian, 
Geillis Duncan, and two others, who " baptized" a cat in a man- 
ner thus described in the confession of Agnes Sampsoun : 
" First, two of them held one finger in the one side of the chim- 
ney-crook, and another held another finger in the other side, the 
two nibs of the fingers meeting together ; thus they put the cat 
thrice through the links of the crook, and passed it thrice under 
the chimney." They subsequently tied to the four feet of the 
cat four joints of dead men ; and it was then carried to Leith, 
and the witches took it to the pier-head about midnight, and 
threw it into the sea. Another party of the conspirators, at 
Preston-Pans, threw another cat into the sea at eleven o'clock at 
night. The result of all this was a storm so dreadful, that the 
boat between Leith and Kinghorn perished with all on board, 
amounting to three-score persons. 

This particxdar quality of the cats for raising storms is not 
easily accounted for. Dr. Fian was accused of the hunting of 
a cat at Tranent ; in which hunt he was carried high above the 
ground, with great swiftness, and as lightly as the cat herself, 
over " a higher dyke than he was able to lay his hand to the 
head of;" and when asked why he pursued the cat, he replied, 
that Ut a convention held at the " Brumehoillis," Satan had com- 
manded all that were present to catch cats, to be cast into the 
sea for the purpose of raising winds for the destruction of ships. 
A cat was subsequently cast into the sea to raise winds on the 
king's passageto Denmark ; and when the king was returning, 
another convention was held, at which Satan promised to raise 
a mist, and cast the king into England, for which purpose he 
threw into the sea a thing like a foot-ball, in the presence of 

11 ' 



322 SORCERY AND r,lAGIC. 

Dr. Fian, who saw a vapor and smoke rise from the spot where 
it touched the water. 

The king and his consort, as we have seen, escaped all the 
perils of the sea, and landed safely in Scotland. Satan con- 
fessed that James was " un homme de Dieu," and that he had 
little power over him ; but after his return, new plans were 
formed for the king's destruction, at the moment when Bothwell 
was plotting rebellion against his sovereign. On Lammas Eve 
(July 31st), 1590, nine of the principal sorcerers, including Dr. 
Fian, Agnes Sampsoun, Euphame Mackalzeane, and Barbara 
Napier, with others to the number of thirty, met at the New 
Haven, between Mussilburgh and Preston-Pans, at a spot called 
the " Fayrie-hoillis," when the devil made his appearance in 
the form of a black man, which was " thought most meet to do 
the turn for which they were convened." When they had all 
taken the places assigned to them, Agnes Sampsoun proposed 
. that they should consult for the destruction of the king. The 
devil, after stating that their designs were likely to be thwarted, 
promised them a picture of wax, and directed them to hang up 
and roast a toad, and lay the drippings of the toad, mixed with 
" Strang wash," an adder's skin, and " the thing in the forehead 
of a new-foaled foal," in the way where the king was to pass, or 
hang it in a position where it might drop on his body. Agnes 
Sampsoun was appointed to make the figure, which she did, 
and gave it to the evil one, who promised to prepare it and de- 
liver it to them for use within a short time. The process of the 
toad was carried into effect, and the dripping was to have fallen 
on the king " during his majesty's being at the Brig of Die, the 
day before the common bell rang, for fear the earl Bothwell 
should have entered Edinburgh." It happened, however, that 
the king did not pass by the way he was expected. 

The image of wax appears to have been considered a mat- 
ter of much greater moment — a last and terrible resource, and 
there was evidently more than one meeting on the subject be- 
tween the time above-mentioned and the eve of Hallowmass, 
1590. An unusually solemn meeting had been called for that 
night, to be held at North Berwick church, where the witches 
assembled to the number of above a hundred, among which num- 
ber there were only six men. Agnes Sampsoun confessed that 
she went thither on horseback, and arrived at the churchyard 
about eleven o'clock at night, across which they danced, Dr. 
Fian leading the way, and Geillis Duncan, as usual, playing to 
them on a trump. At the church the women first made their 



THE DEVIL IN THE PULPIT. 123 

homage, being turned six times " widderschinnes" (that is in 
the contrary direction to the course of the sun), and then the 
men were turned in the same manner nine times. Fian next 
blew open the church door, and blew in the lights, which were 
like great black candles held in an old man's hand, round the 
pulpit. The devil suddenly rose up in the pulpit in the form of 
a black man, with a black beard sticking out like that of a goat, 
and a high ribbed nose, falling down like the beak of a hawk, 
" with a long rumple." He was clad in a black gown, with an 
" evil-favored" skull-cap, also black, on his head. John Fian 
stood beside the pulpit, as clerk, and next to him was Robert 
Greirsoun, above-mentioned. Some of the company stood and 
others sat. The fiend first read from a black book their names, 
and each when called answered, " Here, master." On this oc- 
casion Satan appears to have been in some confusion, for where- 
as it was the custom for every one to have a nickname, by which 
only they were to be named in that company, that of Robert 
Greirsoun being " Rob the Rowar," the devil called him by his 
own proper name, which caused great scandal and clamor, and 
they all ran " hirdie-girdie," and were angry. The excitement 
was increased by his making the same mistake with regard to 
Euphame Mackalzeane and Barbara Napier. When this out- 
break was appeased, Satan made a short sermon, exhorting them 
all to be good servants and to continue doing as much evil as 
they could. This was followed by another outburst of dissatis- 
faction, on account of the image of wax that was not yet forth- 
coming. Robert Greirsoun, urged on by the women, said, 
" Where is the thing ye promised ?" To appease the tumult, 
which was becoming greater and greater, the fiend replied that 
" It should be gotten the next meeting, and he would hold the 
next assembly for that cause the sooner ; it was not ready at that 
time." Robert Greirsoun, who was perhaps offended at the mis- 
take about his name, called out, " Ye promised twice and de- 
ceived us!" and four "honest-like women," as Barbara Napier 
termed them in her confession, were very importunate, and ob- 
tained a promise that the image should be delivered very short- 
ly to Barbara Napier and Euphame Mackalzeane, without wait- 
ing for another meeting. In the midst of this tumult, poor Grey 
Meill, the door-ke&per, was imprudent enough to say that 
" nothing ailed the king yet, God be thanked !" for which " the 
devil gave him a great blow." We are told that the devil gave 
as a reason for his tardiness, the king's extreme piety and wis- 
dom, which had preserved him from all dangers ; and the king 



124 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

was not a little flattered by this confession. After this business 
was ended, the company appear to have had a sort of a revel, 
and they opened two graves within and one without the church, 
and took the joints of the dead to make charms of, which were 
shared among, them, and then they departed, having given the 
evil one the accustomed compliment of a kiss behind. It ap- 
pears that the judicial prosecution arose before any further prog- 
ress could be made with the image of wax. 

The strange circumstances described above, with much more, 
were confessed to, more or less, by nearly thirty individuals, so 
that we can hardly do otherwise than suppose that the persons 
implicated, under some mental illusion, had plotted together to 
^effect a criminal object by superstitious practices. Much, how- 
ever, of the more extravagant part of the story was probably sug- 
gested by the questions put by their examiners, and extorted 
under the terror and the feeling of helplessness produced by the 
cruelty and tyranny of their tormentors. We have already seen 
the manner in which Geilles Dmican's confession was wrenched 
from her. The firmness with which many of them suffered was 
looked upon as diabolical obstinacy, and only provoked to the 
application of severer tortures. Those to which Dr. Fian was 
subjected were too horrible to be described. Agnes Sampsoun 
was examined before the king at Holyrood House ; she bore 
the torture, which is described in the old narrative as " a payne 
most grevous," firmly and without confession ; upon which she 
was stripped, the hair shaved from her body, and " the devil's 
mark" found in a part where it was a cruel insult to her woman- 
hood to search. She confessed anything rather than submit to 
further indignities. 

The king, we are told, " took great delight" in these exam- 
inations ; and the confessions put him " in a wonderful admira- 
tion." His vanity was flattered, at the same time that his curi- 
osity was excited and gratified. He made Geilles Duncan play 
before him on her trump (or Jew's harp) the same tune to which 
the witches had danced in their meetings. The trials continued 
to occupy him throughout the winter of 1590, and the end was 
more tragical even than the beginning, for the Scottish Solomon 
was inexorable in his judgments. Dr. Fian.was condemned on 
the 26th of December, 1590, and " byrnt" at the beginning of 
January. On the 27th of January, 1591, Agnes Sampsoun was 
sentenced to be taken to the castle-hill of Edinburgh, and there 
be bound to a stake and " wirreit" [worried] till she was dead, 
and thereafter her body burnt to ashes ; all which was duly ex- 



KING JAMES ON WITCHCRAFT. 1S5 

edited. The sentence of Euphame Mackalzeane was still more 
cruel ; she appears to have been kept long and to have under- 
gone many examinations, probably in the hope that she might 
give up the names of some of Bothwell's accomplices, and an 
the 7th of June, 1591, she was condemned to be burnt alive, the 
others being all strangled before they were committed to the 
flames. During the intervening period many of her accomplices 
of less note suffered at the stake. In the case of Barbara Napier, 
the majority of the jury having acquitted her of the chief articles 
of the charge against her, v/ere themselves threatened — the king 
sitting in judgment in his own person — with a trial for wilful 
error upon an assize, and were compelled to aVoid the conse- 
quences by acknowledging themselves guilty and throwing them- 
selves on the king's mercy, who "pardoned" them. 

King James now became proud of his skill and knowledge in 
the matter of sorcery, and of the wisdom of- his judgments. He 
made it a subject of his special study, and his royal leisure was 
occupied with the compilation, in form of a dialogue, of a trea- 
tise which was printed under the title of "Dasmonologie," with the 
king's name, at Edinburgh, in 1597. In the preface the royal 
author speaks of " the fearfull aboundinge" of witches in Scot- 
land at that time ; and complains bitterly against the English- 
man Reginald Scott, who had attempted to disprove the existence 
of witches, and against Wierus, the German, who had written a 
sort of apology for the persons thus accused, " whereby," says 
the king, " he plainly bewrayes himselfe to have bene one of 
that profession. His majesty's book is much inferior to the 
other treatises on the subject published about the same period ; 
it is compiled from foreign works, and begins with discussing 
very learnedly the nature and existence of witchcraft, and with 
describing the contract with Satan, but it furnishes little or no 
information on the real character of the Scottish superstitions of 
the day. 

11* 



126 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 



CHAPTER XI. 

MAGIC IN ENGLAND DURING THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 

The magician, as we have stated in a former chapter, differed 
from the witch in being the master and not the slave of the 
spirits who were supposed to work his will. In the middle 
ages the knowledge of the few contrasted so marvellously with 
the ignorance of the multitude, that people were easily led to 
put faltli in the report that they obtained it by a communication 
with the invisible world, which they in too many cases design- 
edly propagated, in order to impose more powerfully on popular 
credulity. However, neither the learning of the scholar nor 
the wisdom of the statesman were proof against the influence of 
the universally prevailing belief in magic. The latter not un- 
frequently sought the advice of the astrologer or the aid of the 
magician in his difficulties ; while some of the most profound 
scholars wasted their lives in the unprofitable study of a science, 
the truth of which was pretended to rest on books and rules 
handed down to posterity from the age of Solomon, and even 
from those of Adam and the patriarchs, who were said to have 
received them from the angels Raziel and Raphael. 

The popular belief in this science was strengthened by the 
extraordinary effects of natural processes now commonly under- 
stood, but then known only to a small number of individuals, 
who covered their knowledge with the most profound secrecy ; 
and by the no less extraordinary feats of jugglers, who derived 
their skill in sleight-of-hand from the East, a part of the world 
always celebrated as the cradle of this class of .performers. We 
find in old histories mention of strange exhibitions, which can 
only be explained by the supposition of a combination of optical 
instruments, and by other agencies which indicate an unusual 
knowledge of natural philosophy. The performances of the 
jugglers often excited astonishment and alarm, and they were 
sometimes prosecuted by the church for their presumed inter- 
course with the devil. We are told by the ecclesiastical inquis- 
itor, John Nider, mentioned in a former chapter, that, in the 
latter half of the fifteenth century, a woman made her appear- 
ance at Cologne, who performed many extraordinary feats, such 



POPULAR INFLUENCE OF MAGIC. 127 

as tearing a napkin to pieces, and then in an instant producing 
it uninjured before the eyes of the spectators ; dashing a glass 
against the ceiling, and immediately restoring it whole, and the 
like ; and although these are among the commonest tricks of 
modern sleight-of-hand, it required powerful protectors to screen 
her from the pursuits of the bishop. Even as late as the year 
1595, as we learn from the journal of Pierre I'Estoile, when a 
juggler, who had taught a cat to perform various surprising feats, 
offered to exhibit it before the French king Henri IV., his min- 
isters represented to the monarch that it might be a plot to be- 
witch him, and, although his majesty laughed at their apprehen- 
sions, means were found to get the juggler and his cat out of the 
way. It was indeed at that time an unpopular animal ; a learned 
pig would have had a better chance. In the earlier part of the 
sixteenth century, as we learn from Wierus, a contemporary 
writer on these subjects, there was a man at Magdeburg who 
undertook to ride up in the air, and, under this pretext, collected 
from those who were eager to witness his departure a considera- 
able sum of money. The people who had paid their money met 
on the day appointed ; they saw the man bring forth a horse and 
perform certain mysterious ceremonies, whereupon it began to 
rise from the ground ; the conjuror took hold of the horse's tail, 
and, as he gradually mounted upward, his wife took hold of him, 
and their servant held by his mistress, and so they disappeared, 
to the great astonishment of the beholders. But in the midst of 
their admiration, a townsman, returning from a visit to the coun- 
try, informed them that he had seen the juggler marching away 
with his family and his spoils, along one of the public roads 
leading from the city, in the same ordinary manner in which 
other mortal men are accustomed to travel. The whole was a 
deception. 

Treatises on magic, both in manuscript and in print, M^ere 
abundant. In these we find the description of a numerous host 
of spirits, classed according to their powers, and forms, and at- 
tributes. One had^for its province the care of treasures, another 
the giving of power, this of endowing with eloquence, that of 
procuring or destroying love. Each of these, by certain cere- 
monies and invocations, might be made subservient to the per- 
son who called him up. So general was the belief in the effi- 
cacy of these charms and ceremonies, that even late in the six- 
teenth century, when men of enlightened minds printed them in 
order to expose them to ridicule, others, their opponents, but 
men of learning and character, such as Bodin, cried out with 



128 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

terror at the danger likely to arise from placing Avithin the reach 
of the vulgar such powerful instruments of mischief. Some- 
times the magician called the spirit to a charmed circle ; some- 
times he compelled him to appear in a* mirror ; but the more 
usual method was to force the spirit into a crystal, or stone, and 
to hold him confined there until he had answered the pm-poses 
for which he was called. Dee's conjuring stone was preserved 
in the Strawberry Hill collection, and is described as being ap- 
parently a polished piece of kennel coal. The works on magic 
give the several invocations and forms for calling each particu- 
lar spirit ; and there are even incantations of a more stringent 
nature to be used for the purpose of constraining or punishing 
such spirits as might show obstinacy toward those who called 
upon them. A volume of this description among the manu- 
scripts in the British Museum (MS. Sloane, No. 3850, fol. 149), 
after giving a charm, and directions for using it, goes on to say, 
" The virtue of this, first, is, that if any spirit were in any glass, 
and any of these figures laid upon the said glass, that then the 
spirit should not depart till the figure were removed ; and when 
thou wilt bind or conjure any spirit, then thou must bind the seal 
of Solomon about thy right arm, the pentagon and mortagon 
about thy head, and the girdle about thy breast : then hold a 
little myrrh and frankincense under thy tongue, and call what 
spirit thou wilt, and he will presently, without delay, come and 
obey thee in what he may." It was necessary that persons 
using these charms should be well acquainted with the science 
and its applications ; for, although, when properly performed, 
they made the magician absolute master of the spirit, the latter 
was an unwilling servant, and if the slightest error were made 
in the incantation, he not unfrequently took his revenge by rush- 
ing on the unskilful scholar, and carrying him away. In 1530, as 
Wierus tells us, a priest of Nuremburg had recourse to such in- 
cantations, and the devil showed him in a glass where treasure 
lay buried. The priest went to the spot, and began digging, 
but, when he had just come in sight of the che^t of treasure and 
of a black dog which guarded it, the earth fell in upon him and 
buried him, and nobody could find the place afterward. 

As we approach the age of the Reformation, we find that the 
study of magic and alchemy had become extremely common 
among the Romish clergy. This was especially the case in 
England, where we hear of frequent instances of priests and 
monks who ventured to dabble in the forbidden sciences. Un- 
der the first monarchs of the Tudor dynasty, the extraordinary 



WILLIAM NEVILLE. 129 

and rapid elevation of men like Wolsey and Cromwell, from 
comparatively low stations in life to the possession of immense 
wealth and almost regal power, led people to suspect the inter- 
vention of supernatural agency, and set people mad in their 
efforts in search of treasure and the attainment of power. In 
the reign of bluff King Hal, to judge by documents still preserved, 
this island must have been full of conjurors. One or two curi- 
ous examples are furnished by documents among the Cromwell 
papers in the record-office of the Rolls-House. 

Among these ambitious hunters after fortune was one of the 
Neville family, who is merely described as William Neville, 
" gent," but who had a house at " Weke," near Oxford, and who 
appears to have held some place in the haughty cardinal's house- 
hold. At the period of Wolsey's greatness, a magician who is 
described as " one Wood, gent," was dragged before the privy- 
council, charged with some misdemeanor which was connected 
with the intrigues of the day. In a paper addressed to the lords 
of the council. Wood states that William Neville had sent for 
him to his own house at Oxford, it being the first communica- 
tion he ever had with that " gent." After he had been at Weke 
a short time, Neville took him by the arm and led him privately 
into the garden, and, to use the quaint language of the original, 
" ther demawndyd of me many questyons, and amowng all other 
askyd [if it] were not possible to have a rynge made that showld 
brynge man in favor with hys prynce, saying my lord cardinale 
had suche a rynge that whatsomevere he askyd of the kynges 
grace that he hadd yt, ' and IMaster Cromwell, when he and I 
were servauntys in my lord cardynales housse, dyd hawnt to the 
company of one that was seyne in your faculte, and shortly after 
no man so grett with my lord cardynale as Master Cromwell 
was.'" Neville added, that he had spoken " with all those who 
have any name in this realm," who had assured him that in the 
same way he might become " great with his prince," and he 
ended by asking of the reputed magician what books he had 
studied on the subject. The latter continues, " and I, at the 
harte desyre of hym, showyd hym that I had rede many bokes, 
and specyally the boke of Salamon, and how his rynges be 
made and of what mettell, and what vertues they had after the 
canon of Salamon." He added, that he had also studied the 
magical work of Hermes. William Neville then requested him 
to undertake the making of a ring, which he says that he de- 
clined, and so went away for that time. But Neville sent for 
him again, and entered into further jcommunication with him on 



130 SORCERY AND MAGIO. 

the old subject, telling him that he had with him another con- 
jurer, named Wade, who could show him more than he should; 
and, among other things, had showed him that " he should be a 
great lord." This was an effective attempt to move Wood's 
jealousy ; and it appears that Neville now prevailed upon him 
to make " moldes," probably images, " to the entent that he 
showld a had Mastres Elezebeth Gare," on whom he seems to 
have set his love. Perhaps she was a rich heiress. Wood 
then enters into excuses for himself, declaring that, although at 
the desire of" some of his friends," he had called to a stone for 
things stolen, he had not undertaken to find treasures ; and he 
concludes with the naive boast, " but to make the phylosofer's 
stone, I wyll chebard [that is, jeopard] my lyffe to do hyt, yf 
hyt plesse the kynges good grace to command me do hyt." This 
was the pride of science above the low practitioners. He even 
offered to remain in prison until he had performed his boast, and 
only asked " twelve months upon silver, and twelve and a half 
upon gold." This reminds us of the story of Pierre d'Estaing 
and the lord of Bauftremont. 

The search of treasures, which the conjuror Wood so earnest- 
ly disclaims, was, however, one of the most usual occupations 
of our magicians of this period. The frequent discoveries of 
Roman or Saxon, or medieval deposites, in the course of acci- 
dental digging — then probably more common than at present — 
was enough to v»'het the appetite of the needy or the miserly ; 
and the belief that the sepulchral barrow, or the long-deserted 
ruin, or even the wild and haunted glen, concealed treasures of 
gold and silver of great amount, has been carried down to our 
own days in a variety of local legends. Hidden treasures were 
under the particular charge of some of the spirits who obeyed 
the magician's call, and we still trace his operations in many a 
barrow that has been disturbed, and ruined floor which has been 
broken up. That these searches were not always successful 
will be evident from the following narrative. 

In the reign of Henry YHL, a priest named William Stapleton 
was placed under arrest as a conjuror, and as having been mixed 
up in some court intrigues, and at the request of Cardinal Wolsey 
he wrote an account of his adventures, still preserved in the 
Roll's House records (for it is certainly addressed to Wolsey, 
and not, as has been supposed, to Cromwell). Stapleton says 
that he had been a monk of the mitred abbey of St. Benet in the 
Holm, in Norfolk, where he was resident in the nineteenth of 
Henry VHI., that is, in 1527 or 1528, at which time he borrowed 



WILLIAM STAPLETON. 131 

of one Dennys, of Hofton, who had procured them of the vicar 
of Watton, a book called " Thesaurus Spirituum, and after that 
another, called Secreta Secrctorum, a little ring, a plate, a circle, 
and also a sword for the art of digging," in studying the use of 
which he spent six months. Now it appears that Stapleton had 
small taste for early rising, and after having been frequently 
punished for being absent from matins and negligent of his duty 
in church, he obtained a license of six months from the abbot to 
go into the world, and try and raise money to buy a dispensation 
from an order which seemed so little agreeable to his taste. The 
first person he consulted with was his friend Dennys, who 
recommended him to try his skill in finding treasure, and intro- 
duced him to two " knowing men," who had " placards," or 
licenses from the king to search for treasure trove, which were 
not unfrequently bought from the crown at this period. These 
men lent him other books and instruments belonging to the " art 
of digging," and they went together to a place named Sidestrand 
in Norfolk, to search and mark out the ground where they 
thought treasure should lie. It happened, however, that the 
lady Tyrry, to whom the estate belonged, received intelligence 
of their movements, and, after sending for them and subjecting 
them to a close examination, ordered them to leave her grounds. 

After this rebuff, the treasure-seekers went to Norwich, where 
they became acquainted with another conjurer named Godfrey, who 
had a " shower," or spirit ; " which spirit," Stapleton says, " I had 
after myself;" and they went together to Felmingham, and there 
Godfrey's boy did " scry" unto the spirit, but after opening the 
ground they found nothing there. There are Roman barrows at 
Felmingham, which, when examined recently, appeared to have 
been opened at a former period in search of treasure. The dis- 
appointed conjurers returned to Norwich, and there met with a 
stranger, who iDrought them to a house in which it was supposed 
that treasure lay concealed ; and Stapleton again applied himself 
to his incantations, and called the spirit of the treasure to appear, 
but he turned a deaf ear to their charms, " for I suppose of a 
truth," is the pithy observation of the operator, "that there was 
none." 

Disappointed and disgusted, Stapleton now gave up the pur- 
suit, and obtained money from a friend with which he bought a 
dispensation to quit his monastic order, and returned to Norfolk 
with the intention of establishing himself as a hermit. 

Perhaps William Stapleton's object in turning hermit was to 
follow his former pursuits with more secrecy. In Norfolk he 



132 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

soon met with some of his old treasure-seeking acquaintances, 
who urged him to go to work again, which he refused to do un- 
less his books were better. They told him of a man of the name 
of Leech, who had a book, to which the parson of Lesingham 
had bound a spirit called " Andrea Malchiis ;" and to this man he 
went. Leech let him have all his instruments, and told him 
further that the parson of Lesingham and tSir John of Leiston 
(another ecclesiastic) with others, had called up of late by the 
jneans of the book in question three spirits, Andrew Malchus (be- 
fore mentioned), Oberion, and Inchubus. " When these spirits," 
he said, " were all raised, Oberion would in nowise speak. And 
then the parson of Lesingham did demand of Andrew Malchus, 
and so did Sir John of Leiston also, why Oberion would not 
speak to them. And Andrew Malchus made answer, ' For be- 
cause he was bound unto the lord-cardinal.' And that also they 
did entreat the said parson of Lesingham, and the said Sir John 
of Leiston, that they might depart as at that time ; and whenso- 
ever it would please them to call them up again, they would glad- 
ly do them any service they could." 

When Stapleton had made this important acquisition, he re- 
paired again to Norwich, where he had not long been, when he 
was found by a messenger from a personage whom he calls the 
lord Leonard Marquees, who lived at " Calkett Hall," and who 
wanted a person expert in the art of digging. He met Lord 
Leonard at Walsingham, who promised him that if he would 
take pains in exercising the said art, he would sue out a dispen- 
sation for him to be a secular priest, and so make him his chap- 
lain. The lord Leonard proceeded rather shrewdly to make trial 
of the searcher's talents ; for he directed one of his servants to 
hide a sum of money in the garden, and Stapleton " shewed" for 
it, and one Jackson " scryed," but he was unable to find the 
money. Yet, without being daunted at this slip, Stapleton went 
directly with two other priests. Sir John Shepe and Sir Robert 
Porter, to a place beside Creke Abbey, where treasure was sup- 
posed to be, and " Sir John Shepe called the spirit of the treas- 
ure, and I showed to him, but all came to no purpose.'''' 

Stapleton now went to hide his disappointment in London, and 
remained there some weeks, till the lord Leonard, who had sued 
out his dispensation as he promised, sent for him to pass the winter 
with him in Leicestershire, and toward spring he returned to Nor- 
folk. And there he was informed that there was " much money" 
hidden in the neighborhood of Calkett Hall, and especially in the 
Bell Hill (probably an ancient tumulus or barrow), and after 



WILLIAM STAPLETON. 133 

some delay, he obtained his instruments, and went to work with 
the parish priest of Gorleston, but " of truth we could bring noth- 
ing to effect." On this he again repaired to London, carrying 
his instruments with him, and on his arrival he was thrown into 
prison at the suit of the lord Leonard, who accused him of leav- 
ing his service without permission, and all his instruments were 
seized. These he never recovered, but he was soon liberated 
from prison, and obtained temporary employment in the church. 

But his conjuring propensities seem still to have lingered about 
him, and we find this ex-monk and hermit, and now secular priest, 
soon afterward engaged in an intrigue which led him eventually 
into a much more serious danger. It appears by Stapleton's 
statements, that one Wright, a servant of the duke of Norfolk, 
came to him, and " at a certayn season shewed me that the duke's 
grace, his master, was soore vexed with a spyrytt by the enchant- 
ment of your grace" — he is addressing Wolsey. Stapleton says 
that he refused to interfere, but that Wright went to the duke and 
told him that he, Stapleton, knew of his being enchanted by Car- 
dinal Wolsey, and that he could help him ; upon which the duke 
sent for Stapleton, and had an interview with him. It had pre- 
viously been arranged by Wright and Stapleton (who says that 
he had been urged into the plot by the persuasion of Wright, and 
by the hope of gain and prospect of obtaining the duke's favor), 
that he should say he knew tha,t the duke was persecuted by a 
spirit, and that he had " forged" an image of wax in his simili- 
tude, which he had enchanted, in order to relieve him. The 
duke of Norfolk appears at first to have placed implicit belief in 
all that Stapleton told him ; he inquired of him if he had certain 
knowledge that the lord-cardinal had a spirit at his command, to 
which he replied in the negative. He then questioned him as to 
his having heard any one assert- that the cardinal had a spirit ; 
on which Stapleton told him of the raising of Oberion by the 
parson of Lesingham and Sir John of Leiston, and how Oberion 
refused to speak, because he was the lord-cardinal's spirit.. The 
duke, however, soon after this, became either suspicious or fear- 
ful, and he eventually sent Stapleton to the cardinal himself, who 
appears to have committed him to prison, and at whose order he 
drew up the account here abridged. 

The foregoing is the history of a man who, after having been 
a victim to his implicit belief in the efficiency of magical opera- 
tions, was himself driven at last to have recourse to intentional 
deception. The number of such treasure-hunters appears to 
have been far greater among his contemporaries, of almost all 

12 



134 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

classes of society, than we should at first glance be led to sup- 
pose. A few years before the date of these events, in the 12th 
Henry VIII., or A. D., 1521, the king had granted to Robert 
Lord Curzon, the monopoly of treasure-seeking in the counties 
of Norfolk and Suffolk, and Lord Curzon immediately delegated 
to a man, named William Smith, of Clopton, and a servant or 
retainer of his own, named Amylyon, not only the right of search 
thus given to him, but the power to arrest and proceed against 
any other person they found seeking treasures within the two 
counties. It appears that Smith and Amylyon had in some cases 
used this delegated authority for purposes of extortion; and in 
the summer of the same year, Smith was brought up before the 
Court of the city of Norwich, at the suit of William Goodred, of 
Great Melton, the minutes of the proceedings against him still 
remaining on the records. We here again find priests concerned 
in these singular operations. 

It appears that the treasure-diggers, who had received their 
" placard" of Lord Curzon in March, went to Norwich about 
Easter, and paid a visit to a schoolmaster, named George Dow- 
sing, dwelling in the parish of St. Faith, who, they had heard, 
was " seen in astronymve." They showed him their license for 
treasure-seeking, v/hich authorized them to press into their ser- 
vice any persons they might find who had skill in the science ; 
so that it would appear that they were not capable of raising spir- 
its themselves, without the assistance of " scholars." The 
schoolmaster entered v/illingly into their projects, and they went, 
about two or three o'clock in the morning, with one or two other 
persons who were admitted into their confidence, and dug in 
ground beside " Butter Hilles," within the walls of the city, but 
'■'■found nolldng ihereT These " hilles," also, were probably tu- 
muli. They next proceeded to a place called " Seynt William 
in the Wood, by Norwich," where they excavated two days (or 
rather two nights), but with no better success. 

They now held a meeting at the house of one Saunders, in 
the market of Norwich, and called to their assistance two eccle- 
siastics, one named Sir William, the other. Sir Robert Cromer, 
the former being the parish priest of St. Gregory's. At this 
meeting, George Dowsing raised " a spirit or two," in a glass ; 
but one of the priests, Sir Robert Cromer, " began and raised a 
spirit first." This spirit, according to the depositions, was seen 
by two or three persons. Amylyon deposed that " he was at 
Saunders's, where Sir Robert Cromer held up a stone, but he 
could not perceive anything in it ; but that George Dowsing 



PERSECUTION OF FARMER GOODRED. 135 

caused to rise in a glass a little thing of the length of an inch or 
thereabout, but whether it was a spirit or a shadow he can not 
tell, but the said George said it was a spirit." However, spirit 
or no spirit, they seem to have had as little success as ever in 
discovering the treasure. 

Unable, after so many attempts, to find a treasure themselves, 
they seem now to have resolved on laying a general contribution 
on everybody who followed the same equivocal calling. They 
went first and accused a person of the name of Wikman, of Mor- 
ley Swanton, in the county of Norfolk, of " digging of hilles," 
and, by threatening to take him before Lord Curzon, they ob- 
tained from him ten shillings. Under the same pretext, they 
took from a lime-burner of Norwich, named White, a " crystal- 
stone," and tweivepence in money, in order that he " should not 
be put to further trouble." They took both books (probably con- 
juring books) and money from John Wellys, of Hunworth, near 
Holt Market, whom, similarly, they accused, of '• digging of 
hilles." And of another person, laboring under the same charge, 
they took " a crystal-stone and certain money." 

The case of William Goodred, " husbandman," of Great Mel- 
ton, in Norfolk, affords a remarkable instance of the manner in 
which these worthies went to work. On St. George's Eve 
(April 22d, 1521), Smith, Amylyon, and an accomplice of the 
name of Judy, came to Goodred, as he was at the plough in 
Melton field, and charged him with being a "hill-digger." In 
order to settle the dispute, they adjourned from the field to an 
" ale-hous" in Melton, where several persons were drinking, and 
there they took Goodred into the yard to examine him. He de- 
nying the charge. Smith drew his dagger, and threatened that, 
unless he would confess to them that he was a hill-digger, he 
" would thrust his dagger through his cheeks." Goodred still 
persisted in his denial ; whereupon Smith, Amylyon, and Judy, 
finding that he would not confess " to their minds," asked him 
what money he vi^ould give them " to have no further trouble." 
On his refusing to give them anything, they threatened to carry 
him to Norwich Castle. The noise in the yard had now brought 
out several men of substance, who were drinking in the alehouse, 
and who not onl}^ attempted to bring the accusers to reason, but 
oflered to give security, to the amount of a hundred pounds, for 
Goodred's appearance to answer apy charges brought against 
him. But this was not what Smith and his companions wanted, 
and they refused, and led away Goodred as far as Little Melton, 
accompanied by those who had joined them at the alehouse, and 



136 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

there they met a Mi-. Calle, who also ofTered to be surety for 
Goodred, but in vain. They thus proceeded to carry their pris- 
oner to Norwich, but at la.st, after much wrangling, they agreed 
to take surety of the persons who had followed them from Great 
Melton for Goodred's appearance at Norwich the next day. Ac- 
cordingly, on St. George's day, Goodred, with his sureties, came 
to the house of Saunders already mentioned, in the market-place, 
and there Smith and Amylyon asked him again how much money 
he would give them to have no further trouble, " or elles they 
would send him to the castle." On his again refusing to give 
any money, they dragged him through the market-place toward 
the castle, but at Cutlers' Row his courage failed him, and " for 
fear of imprisonment," he engaged to give Smith twenty shil- 
lings, in part of which he paid down to him, on a stall in Cut- 
lers' Row, six shillings and eightpence, and gave sureties for the 
remainder, which was duly paid on the following Saturday, and 
Smith and Amylyon had the impudence to give him a written 
acquittance. 

Such was the oppressive manner in which, in former days, 
men could act under cover of the livery or license of a lord. 
The matter was brought before the court of Norwich, as stated 
above, and Amylyon, who appears to have had a quarrel with 
his accomplice Smith, came forward as a witness against him. 
But still there appears to have- been no great expectation of se- 
curing justice in this court ; and the persons injured had re- 
course to a surer manner of obtaining vengeance. They swore 
that, at Great Melton, one of the party asking Smith if he had 
heard that the duke of Buckingham was committed to the Tower,* 
he had answered, " Yea, and therefor a very mischief and ven- 
geance upon the heads of my lord cardinal and of my lord of 
Suffolk, for they are the causers thereof!" And when his inter- 
rogator observed, " Beware what ye say," Smith, " setting his 
hands under his sides," answered again, " By the mass, I would 
say it again, even if I were before my lord cardinal and my lord 
of Suffolk, before their faces !" We are left to guess at the re- 
sult ; but in the days of Cardinal Wolsey a man who used free- 
dom of speech like this would with difficulty escape the gallows. 

Other instances might be quoted of the infatuation of men at 
this period, in seeking treasures by means of magical operations, 
the influence of which was long after felt, even in an age when 

* Edward Stafford, duke of Buckiugham, having incurred the enmity of Cardinal 
"Wolsej', the proud prelate pursued him to the scaffold, and it v^-as just at this lime 
that he was by his means attainted of higli treason and executed. The expression 
of sympathy with the duke was looked upon as amounting to treason. 



THE DEVIL AND HIS DAM. 137 

true science had made wide and solid progress in the land. In 
1574, the celebrated Dr. Dee petitioned Lord Burghley to obtain 
for him from Queen Elizabeth a license of monopoly of treasure- 
digging in England. This superstition appears to have lingered 
longest in Wales and on the borders Among the Landsdowne 
manuscripts there is a letter from John Wogan, sheriff of Pem- 
brokeshire, to Lord Burghley, informing him that it was reported 
that certain persons had " found at an old pair of walles at Spit- 
tell, in the said county, a great quantity of treasure, gold and sil- 
ver, contained in a certain work of brass (that is, a brass pot), 
as is supposed, and that they had knowledge thereof by the ad- 
vertisement of one Lewis, a priest dwelling in Carmarthenshire." 
The worthy sheriff, who appears to have considered this an 
affair of momentous importance, adds that, besides examining 
various persons said to have been concerned in this matter, he 
with others had " repaired to the place, and found the walls 
broken with engines, and a place within the centre of the wall 
containing one foot square fit for such a work, and the rest of 
the ,work had made black the circumference of the place ;" and 
expresses his opinion that " the truth of this matter will never 
be bolted out, v/ithout that the priest be examined, and the par- 
ties also menaced with some torture or extremity." Long after 
this, a man named William Hobby, who appears at the time to 
have been in confinement in the Tower, writes to Lord Burghley, 
on the 28th of April, 1589, for authority to seek treasure in 
Skenfrith castle, in Monmouthshire, where he gravely informs 
the old and experienced minister that " the voyce of the coun- 
threy goeth there is a dyvell and his dam, one sitts upon a hogs- 
hed of gold, the other upon a hogshed of silver." The writer 
undertakes, if properly authorized, to drive away these loath- 
some guardians of the treasures of olden times. 

The treasure-hunting mania seems not to have been confined 
to England at the time of which we have been speaking above, 
but it spread over Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. In the 
latter country, as we learn from Llorente, a Spanish noble named 
Don Diego Fernandez de Heredia, was, on the ninth of May, 
1591, denoimced to the inquisitors of Saragossa on the charge 
of necromancy. He was said to have been in league with a 
Moorish magician of the village of Lucenic, from whom he ob- 
tained some Arabic books of magic, and these he communicated 
to another Moorish magician, named Francisco de Marquina, 
who read the books and told him they contained rules and di- 
rections for discovering concealed treasures. Don Diego took 

12* 



138 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

this magician home to his house, and in a very dark summer 
night they proceeded, with the book of magic and one or two 
companions, to the hermitage of Matamal, not far from the Ebro, 
■where Marquina said that, according to the book, a great horde 
of gold and silver money vi^as concealed. When they had arrived 
there, and everything was ready, the necromancer Marquina pro- 
nounced the formula of conjuration, and immediately, we are 
told, loud thunder was heard on the hill beside them, and Mar- 
quina advanced toward it, and pretended to hold converse with 
the demon. He returned to inform his companions that they 
must dig under the altar of the hermitage, and they began their 
operations under Don Diego's directions, while he went to con- 
tinue his discourse with the evil one. It is probable that the 
hermitage was built on a Roman site, for they found some frag- 
ments of pottery, although there was no treasure. On this, the 
demons were conjured anew, and they said that there certainly 
was treasure, but that it was very deep, and the time destined 
for its discovery was not yet arrived. The next night they went 
to another solitary place, near Xelsa, a town which occupies 
the site of the Roman Celsa. It is probable that they had again 
hit upon a Roman burial-place, for, after repeating the same con- 
jurations, they found, as we are told, some earthen vases and a 
quantity of cinders and ashes, but no treasure, the absence of 
which was explained in the same way as before. 

As tlie searchers appear always to have chosen sites of this 
description, led probably by popular tradition, it is not surpri- 
sing if their search was at times crowned with success. Ignor- 
ance and superstition combined led them to attribute this to the 
efficacy of their charms, in which they seem honestly to have 
placed confidence. Indeed, when we read the old and apparent- 
' ly au'thentic descriptions of the performances of some of the pre- 
tended magicians of former days, we are not surprised that the 
science should gain belief. The wild stories of a Bacon or a 
Faustus scarcely exceed the realities which are described by 
old writers, and which must have been brought about by some 
sort of optical delusion, assisted of course by the imagination. 
One of the most remarkable instances Vv^ith which I remember to 
have met is that told in the Autobiography of the celebrated 
Benvenuto Cellini, a writer who is generally looked upon as 
worthy of belief. In his youth Benvenuto fell in love with a 
courtesan, from whom he was suddenly separated by the depar- 
ture of the lady from Rome. 

" Two months after,"' says he, " the girl wrote me word, thai 



CELLINI AND THE NECROMANCER. 139 

she was .in Sicily, extremely nnhappy. I was then indulging 
myself in pleasures of all sorts, and had engaged in another 
amour to cancel the memory of my Sicilian mistress. It hap- 
pened, through a variety of odd accidents, that I made acquaint- 
ance with a Sicilian priest, who was a man of 'genius, and well 
versed in the Latin and Greek authors. Happening one day to 
have some conversation with him upon the art of necromancy, I, 
who had a great desire to know something of the matter, told 
him, that I had all my life felt a curiosity to be acquainted with 
the mysteries of this art. The priest made answer, that the 
man must be of a resolute and steady temper who enters upon 
that study. I replied, that I had fortitude and resolution enough, 
if I could but find an opportunity. The priest subjoined, ' If you 
think you have the heart to venture, I will give you all the sat- 
isfaction you can desire.' Thus we agreed to undertake this 
matter. 

" The priest one evening prepared to satisfy me, and desired 
me to look out for a companion or two. I invited one Vincenzo 
Roraoli, who was my intimate acquaintance ; he brought with 
him a native of Pistoia, who cultivated the black art himself. 
We repaired to the Colosseum, and the priest, according to the 
custom of necromancers, began to draw circles upon the ground 
with the most impressive ceremonies imaginable ; he likewise 
brought thither assafoetida, several precious perfumes, and fire, 
with some compositions which diffused noisome odors. As 
soon as he was in readiness, he made an opening in the circle, 
and having taken us by the hand one by one, he placed us with- 
in it. Then having arranged the other parts and assumed his 
wand, he ordered the other necromancer, his partner, to throw 
the perfumes into the fire at a proper time, intrusting, the care 
of the fire and the perfumes to the rest, and began his incanta- 
tions. This ceremony lasted above an hour and a half, when 
there appeared several legions of devils, insomuch that the am- 
phitheatre was quite filled with them. I was busy about the per- 
fumes, when the priest, perceiving there was a considerable 
number of infernal spirits, turned to me, and said, ' Benvenuto, 
ask them something.' I answered, ' Let them bring me into 
the company of my Sicilian mistress, Angelica.' That night 
we obtained no answer of any sort ; but I had received great 
satisfaction in having my curiosity so far indulged. The necro- 
mancer told me it was requisite we should go a second time, as- 
suring me that I should be satisfied in whatever I asked, but 
that I must bring with me a pure and immaculate boy. I took 



140 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

with me a youth, who was in my service, of about twelve years 
of age, together with the same Vincenzo Romoli, who had been 
my companion the first time, and one Agnolino Gaddi, an inti- 
mate acquamtance, whom I likewise prevailed on to assist at the 
ceremony. When we came to the place appointed, the first, 
having made his preparations as before with the same and even 
more striking ceremonies, placed us within the circle, which h& 
had drawn with a more wonderful art and in a more solemn man- 
ner than at our former meeting. Thus having committed the 
care of the perfumes and the fire to my friend Vincenzo, who 
was assisted by Gaddi, he put into my hand a pentacolo* or ma- 
gical chart. The necromancer having begun to make his tre- 
mendous invocations, called by their names a multitude of de- 
mons, who were the leaders of the several legions, and invoked 
them by the virtue and power of the eternal uncreated God, who 
Jives for ever, insomuch that the amphitheatre was almost in an 
instant filled with demons a hundred times more numerous than 
at the former conjuration. Vincenzo Romoli was busied in 
making a fire with the assistance of Agnolino, and burnin<y a 
great quantity of precious perfumes. I, by the direction of the 
necromancer, again desired to be in the company of my Angel- 
ica. , The former thereupon turning to me, said, ' Know, they 
have declared that in the space of a month you shall be in her 
company.' He then requested me to stand resolutely by him, 
because the legions were now above a thousand more in num- 
ber than he had designed, and, besides, these were the most 
dangerous, so that after they had answered my question it be- 
hooved him to be civil to them, and dismiss them quietly. At 
the same time, the boy under the pentacolo was in a terrible 
fright, saying, that there were in that place a million of fierce 
men, who threatened to destroy us ; and that, moreover, four 
armed giants of an enormous stature were endeavoring to break 
mto our circle. During this time, while the necromancer, 
trembling with fear, endeavored by mild and gentle methods to 
dismiss them in the best way he could, Vincenzo Romoli, who 
quivered like an aspen-leaf, took care of the perfumes. Though 
I was as much terrified as any of them, I did my utmost to con- 
ceal the terror I felt, so that I greatly contributed to inspire the 
rest with resolution ; but the truth is, I gave myself over for a 
dead man, seeing the horrid fright the necromancer was in. The 
boy placed his head between his knees, and said, ' In this pos- 
ture will I die ; for we shall all surely perish.' I told him that 
* A preservative against the power of demons. 



CELLINI AND THE NECROMANCER. 141 

all those demons were under us, and what he saw was smoke 
and shadow ; so bid him hold up his head and take courage. 
No sooner did he look up, but he cried out, ' The whole amphi- 
theatre is burning, and the fire is just falling upon us ;' so cover- 
ing his face with his hands, he again exclaimed that destruction 
was inevitable, and he desired to see no more. The necroman- 
cer entreated me to have a good heart, and take care to burn 
proper perfumes ; upon which I turned to Romoli, and bid him 
burn all the most precious perfumes he had. At the same time 
I cast my eye upon Agnolino Gaddi, who was terrified to such a 
degree, that he could scarce distinguish objects, and seemed to be 
half dead. Seeing him in this condition, I said, 'Agnolino, upon 
these occasions a man should not yield to fear, but should stir 
"about and give his assistance ; so come directly and put on some 
more of these perfumes.' Poor Agnolino, upon attempting to 
move, was so violently terrified, that the effects of his fear over- 
powered all the perfumes we were burning. The boy hearing 
a crepitation, ventured once more to raise his head, when seeing 
me laugh, he began to take courage, and said that the devils were 
flying away with a vengeance. 

" In this condition we stayed till the bell rang for morning 
prayer. The necromancer a gain- told us that there remained but 
few devils, and these were at a great distance. When the ma- 
gician had performed the rest of his ceremonies, he stripped off 
his gown, and took up a wallet full of books which he had 
brought wtth him. We all went out of the circle together, keep- 
ing as close to each other as we possibly could, especially the 
boy, who had placed himself in the middle, holding the necro- 
mancer by the coat and me by the cloak. As we were going to 
our houses in the quarter of Banchi, the boy told us that two of 
the demons whom we had seen at the amphitheatre went on be- 
fore us singing and skipping, sometimes running upon the roofs 
of the houses, and sometimes upon the ground. The priest de- 
clared, that though he had often entered magic circles, nothing 
so extraordinary had ever happened to him. As we went along 
he would fain have persuaded me to assist with him at consecra- 
ting a book from which he said we should derive immense 
riches ; we should then ask the demons to discover to us the va- 
rious treasures with which the earth abounds, which would raise 
us to opulence and power ; but that those love affairs were mere 
follies, from whence no good could be expected. I answered, 
that ' I would have readily accepted his proposal, if I had under- 
stood Latin.' He redoubled his persuasions, assuring me that 



142 ' SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

the knowledge of the Latin language was by no means material. 
He added, that he could have found Latin scholars enough, if he 
had thought it worth while to look out for them, but that he could 
never have met with a partner of resolution and intrepidity equal 
to mine, and that I should by all means follow his advice. 
While we were engaged in this conversation, we arrived at our 
respective homes, and all that night I dreamed of nothing but 
devils. 

" As I every day saw the priest, he did not fail to renew his 
solicitations to engage me to come into his proposal. 1 asked 
him what time it would take to carry his plan into execution, 
and where this scene was to be acted. He answered, that in 
less than a month we might complete it, and that the place best 
calculated for our purpose was the mountains of Norcia ; though 
a master of his had performed the ceremony of consecration 
hard bj^ the mountains of the abbey of Farfa, but that he had met 
with some difficulties which would not occur in those of Norcia. 
He added, that the neighboring peasants were men who might 
be confided in, and had some knowledge of necromancy, inso- 
much that they were likely to give us great assistance upon oc- 
casion. Such an effect had the persuasions of this holy conjurer, 
that I readily agreed to all that he desired, but told him, that I 
should be glad to finish the medal I was making for the pope 
first. This secret I communicated to him, but to nobody else, 
and begged he would not divulge it. I constantly asked him 
whether he thought I should, at the time mentioned by the devil, 
have an interview with my mistress Angelica; and finding it ap- 
proach, I was surprised to hear no tidings of her. The priest 
always assured me that I should without fail enjoy her company 
as the demons never break their promise, when they make it. in 
the solemn manner they had done to me. He bid me, therefore, 
wait patiently, and avoid giving room to any scandal upon that 
occasion, but make an effort to bear something against my na- 
ture, as he was aware of the great danger I was to encounter ; 
adding, that it would be happy for me if I w^uld go with him to 
consecrate the book, as it would be the way to obviate the dan- 
ger, and could not fail to make both him and me happy." 

Immediately after this, Benvenuto Cellini fell into so danger- 
ous a scrape at Rome, that he was obliged to fly, and taking his 
route to Naples, he there accidentally met with his mistress on 
the last day of the month predicted by the necromancer. 



. , THE ENGLISH MAGICIANS. 143 

CHAPTER XII. 

THE ENGLISH MAGICIANS : DR. DEE AND HIS FOLLOWERS. 

Whatever may have been the means employed to produce 
the effects described at the end of the preceding chapter, there 
must have been a great and general tendency to belief on the 
part of those to whom they were exhibited. This credulity seems 
to have risen to its greatest height at the time of the Reforma- 
tion, as though, when the mind had been suddenly relieved from 
intellectual restraint, it overleaped, in the first burst of liberty, 
every bound to which sober reason would naturally confine it. 
When we see men of the greatest talents and the most profound 
learning, shutting themselves in their secret studies to push their 
anxious researches beyond the limits of natural knowledge, and 
hear them talking soberly of their intercourse v/ith spirits of an- 
other world and with their rulers, we are almost driven to believe 
that the world had been suddenly deluged with a host of demons 
who amused themselves with turning to mockery the intellectual 
powers of the human race. Nor perhaps was this mental infat- 
uation entirely without its use, for we must not forget that we 
owe some of our fundamental discoveries in science to the ma- 
gicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that one 
of the most universally necessary articles of the present day, our 
almanacs, are derived from the astrologers. 

There is something extraordinary in the rage for the study of 
what were called the occult sciences, which manifested itself at 
the period of which we are speaking. In our own country, 
Caius, the founder of a college of learning in one of our univer- 
sities. Dee, one of the first mathematicians of his age, and many 
of the wisest and best among their contemporaries, gave implicit 
belief to the science which enabled them to invoke and constrain 
the spiritual world. The doings and thoughts of those who spe- 
cially dedicated themselves to such pursuits, form a singular chap- 
ter in the history of human intelligence. 

One of the most remarkable of these, certainly, was Dr. John 
Dee. This celebrated personage was born in London in the 
year 1527. With a mind full of energy and ambition, he studied 
with an eagerness and success that soon raised him to reputation 
in the universities of England and the continent. He is said to 



144 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

have imbibed his taste for the occult sciences, whioii his imagi- 
native, mind retained during his life, while a student at Louvaine ; 
yet it is singular that one of his earliest writings was a defence 
of Roger Bacon against the imputation of having leagued with 
demons to obtain his extraordinary knowledge. Under the reign 
of Mary, Dee was in close correspondence with the princess 
Elizabeth, who from her childhood had been brought up in the 
love of learning and learned men ; and for this intimacy, the 
young philosopher became an object of suspicion, and was thrown 
into prison. Elizabeth preserved her attachm.ent for him during 
her life, and perhaps she had received from him the leaning to 
superstition which she exhibited on more than one remarkable 
occasion. On her accession to the throne, the virgin queen con- 
sulted with him to fix a fortunate day for her coronation ; and sub- 
sequently, when an image of wax in her resemblance was found 
in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, Dee was called to her chamber to exer- 
cise his science in counteracting the charm. 

In his preface to Euclid, printed in 1570, Dee complains that 
he was already reputed a conjurer. In the meager diary edited 
by Mr. Halliwell, and in such of Dee's papers as have been pre- 
served, we find him paying attention to his dreams, to strange 
noises which he fancied he heard at times in his chamber, and 
to other matters of a similar description. In this diary, under 
the date of May 25, 1581, he says, that he then first saw in a 
crystal. It was one of the usual methods of raising spirits at 
this time to bring them into a glass or stone, duly prepared for 
the purpose. One of Dr. Dee's conjuring stones is still pre- 
served ; it was sold at the Strawberry Hill sale.* The particu- 
lar branch of magic, which he followed was that termed theurgy, 
which taught that by a proper disposition of mind, joined with 
purity of life, cleanliness of person, and other conditions, a man 
might be placed in visible communication with good spirits, and 
receive their counsel and assistance. With such views, it is 
not surprising that a man like John Dee should be the easy dupe 
of the first bold and cunning man who undertook to practise on 
his credulity. 

Such a man evidently was Edward Kelly. He was, it seems, 

* This was evidently not the stone which he used in his conferences with the spirits, 
with Edward Kelly for his " skryer," as that was a globe of crystal. That even in 
ancient times optical delusions were practised to make the uninitiated believe in the 
appearance of spirits, is evident from the singular doctrine of the old rabbinical wri- 
ters, that -when spirits were raised they always appeared in areversed position, with 
their heads downward, and their feet in the air. — See the Introduction to Casau- 
bau's edition of Dee's Conference with Spirits. 



DR. DEE AND HIS SKRYSRS. 145 

a native of Lancashire, born, according to Dee's own statement, 
in 1555, but we find him subsequently living at Worcester, in 
the profession of a druggist. He was a man of ill repute, had 
been convicted at Lancaster of coining, and been punished with 
the loss of his ears, and he appears to have found it necessary 
to remove fi-om his native county. He was known as an alche- 
mist and a conjm-er before he became acquainted with Dr. Dee. 
A story has been preserved, told on good authority, which shows 
to what an extent these practices had been carried. One night 
Kelly took a man who was anxious to pierce the mysteries of 
the future, with certain of his servants, into the park of Walton 
le Dale, near Preston, in Lancashire, and there gratified his de- 
sire by means of necromancy. When his incantations were 
ended, Kelly inquired of one of the servants whose corpse had 
been last interred in the churchyard adjoining ; and being told 
that a poor man had been buried there the same day, they dug 
up the body, and the conjurer made it speak and deliver sundry 
" strange predictions." 

At the period when he became acquainted with Kelly, Dee 
was living at his house at Mortlake in Surrey, with his young 
wife, whom he had married in 1578. He was looking out for 
an assistant in his studies, fitted to serve the office of inspector 
of his glass, or, as it was termed, skryer, a name not as D'Israeli 
supposed, invented by Dee. It appears that it was always neces- 
sary to have an assistant to perform this office, who alone com- 
muned with the spirits, and repeated what he saw or heard. In. 
a manuscript of Dee's proceedings, preserved in the British mu- 
seum,* we find copies of prayers with a view to these purposes, 
dated in 1569 and 1579, but his first skryer of whom there is 
any mention, was named Barnabas Saul. In the diary already 
mentioned, Dee has noted down on the 9th of October, 1581, that 
Barnabas Saul was " strangely troubled by a spiritual creature 
about midnight." On the 6th of March following, Saul " con- 
fessed that he neither heard nor saw any spiritual creature any 
more." At this time Saul and his employer were evidently much 
dissatisfied with each other, and it was probably not long after 
when they parted. In the manuscript just quoted, Dee has set 
down his magical proceedings on the 2d of December, 1581, and 
he begins with the statement, " I willed the skryer (named Saul) 
to looke into my great chrystalline globe, if God had sent his 
holy angel Anael, or no." Saul looked, and, as the narrative 

* This curious manuscript, whicli cootains the journal of Dee's earlier conferences 
with spirits, is the Sloane MS., No. 3677. 

13 



146 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

goes on to say, he saw the angel Anael. It was probably Dee's 
own assistant who spread abroad the reports of his being a con- 
jurer. On the 9ih of March, 1582, Dee has made an entry in 
his diary, that, " at dinner-time Mr. Clerkson and Mr. Talbot 
declared a great deal of Barnabas's naughty dealing toward me 
. . . His friend told me, before my Avife and Mr. Clerkson, that 
a spiritual creature told him that Barnabas had censured both 
Mr. Clerkson and me." In the manuscript of the British mu- 
seum, we find Edward Talbot exercising the office of skryer to 
Dr. Dee during a great part of the year 1582, and as Edward 
Kelly was certainly " skrying" at the same time, it is not improb- 
able that they are one and the same person. Weaver speaks of 
him as " Kelly, otherwise called Talbot," so that he seems to 
have passed under both names. From the time of his acquaint- 
ance with Kelly, Dr. Dee kept a regular journal of all that passed 
in his conferences with the spirits, the earlier portion of which 
is preserved in the manuscript in the British museum, and the 
latter part was printed by Meric Casauban, in 1659. 

Kelly soon proved himself a very skilful skryer, and he seems 
to have used the greatest cunning in practising upon Dee's cre- 
dulity, and insinuating himself into his confidence. He^pre- 
tended to doubt the propriety of the work he was employed in, 
and expressed from time to time his suspicions of the character 
of the spirits with whom they were dealing. Dee gives an ac- 
count of one of their quarrels that happened in the April of 
1582, soon after the dinner party described above ; Kelly not 
only expressed his belief that the spirits who came into the glass 
were demons sent to hurry them to their destruction, but he com- 
plained that he was kept in Dee's house as in a prison, that " it 
were better for him to be near Cotsall Plain, where he might 
walk abroad without danger." The feelings of the doctor seem 
to have been much hurt at the doubts thus cast on the respecta- 
bility of his spiritual visiters. 

During this and the following year, Dee's conferences with 
the spirits were very frequent. It appears that he consulted 
them sometimes for himself, and sometimes for others, and they 
often came when not called for. In the year 1583, Albert Las- 
ki, or Alaski, waiwode or prince of Siradia, in Poland, paid a 
visit to the coux't of Queen Elizabeth, and became a frequent vis- 
iter at Dee's house at Mortlake, where he was initiated into these 
spiritual mysteries. Kelly seems to have harbored strange and 
ambitious projects to be carried into effect through Laski, or some 
of the German princes, and he began to work upon his imagination 



THE SPIRITUAL VISITANT, 147 

by the revelations of Dee's magic stone. From this moment the 
spirits could be brought to talk of little but revolutions and migh- 
ty convulsions Avhich were speedily to take place in Europe. 
On the 28th of May, 1583, Dee and Kelly were sitting together 
in the study, talking of the Polish prince and his affairs. " Sud- 
denly," Dee tells us, " there seemed to come out of my oratory a 
spiritual creature, like a pretty girl of seven or nine years of age, 
attired on her head with her hair rowled up before, and hanging 

down very long behind, with a gown of sey changeable 

green and red, and with a train ; she seemed to play up and 
down, and seemed to go in and out behind my books, lying on 
heaps, and as she should ever go between them, the books seemed 
to give place sufficiently, dividing one heap from the other, while 
she passed between them. And so I considered, and heard the 
diverse reports which E. K. made unto this pretty maiden, and 
1 said, ' Whose maiden ai/e you?' 

" She. Whose man are you ? 

" D. I am the servant of God, both by my bound duty, and 
also (I hope) by his adoption. 

" (A. Voyce. You shall be beaten if you tell.) 

" She. Am not I a fine maiden ? give me leave to play in your 
house ; my mother told me she would come and dwell here. 

" D. She went up and down with most lively gestures of a 
young girl playing by herself, and divers times another spake to 
her from the corner of ray study by a great perspective glasse, 
but none was seen beside herself. 

" She. Shall I ? I will. (Now she seemed to answer one in 
the foresaid corner of the study.) I pray you let me tarry a little 
(speaking to one in the foresaid corner J. 

" D. Tell me what you are. 

" She. I pray you let me play with you a little, and I will tell 
you who I am. 

" D. In the name of Jesus, then, tell me. 

" She. I rejoyce in the name of Jesus, and I am a poor little 
maiden, Madimi ; I am the last but one of my mother's children ; 
I have little baby children at home. 

" D. Where is your home 1 

" Mad. I dare not tell you where I dwell, I shall be beaten. 

" D. You shall not be beaten for telling the truth to them that 
love the truth ; to the eternal truth all creatures must be obedient. 

'■''Mad. I warrant you I will be obedient; my sisters say they 
must all come and dwell with you. 



148 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

" D. I desire that they who love God should dwell with me, 
and I with them. 

" Mad. 1 love you now you talk of God. 

" D. Your eldest- sister — her name is Esimeli. 

"Mad. My sister is not so short as you make her. 

" D. Oh, I cry you mercy ! she is to be pronounced Esimeli. 

" E. K. She smileth ; one calls her, saying, ' Come away, 
maiden.' 

" Mad. I will read over my gentlewomen first ; my master 
Dee will teach me if I say amiss. 

" D. Read over your gentlewomen, as it pleaseth you. 
. "Mad. 1 have gentlemen and gentlewomen, look you here. 

" E. K. She bringeth a little book out of her pocket. She 
pointeth to a picture in the book. 

" Mad. Is not this a pretty man; 

" D. What is his name 1 '^ 

" Mad. M}^ [mother] saith his name is Edward ; look you, he 
hath a crown upon his head ; my mother saith that this man was 
duke of York." 

Such is the style in which these extraordinary revelations 
commence. In the earlier books their objects were generally 
matters of much less importance ; but Kelly seems to have, 
formed some wild notions of universal monarchy, like that of 
the older anabaptists of Munster, and to have imagined that the 
Polish prince Lasky was the man to carry out this purpose ; 
and from this time all his visions tended to this point. Madimi, 
who was now one of their most constant visiters, proceeds in the 
scene just described to convince them, by a sort of pictorial 
pedigree, that Lasky v^'as descended from the Anglo-Norman 
family of the Lacies. There is something very extraordinary, 
and certainly great force of imagination, in the grouping and 
character of the spirits by whom Dee imagined that he was vis- 
ited, which exhibits to us the peculiar talents of Edward Kelly. 
When they next consulted the stone, which was on the second 
of June, they were favored with a vision of one like a husband- 
man, who talks ntystically of the wickedness of the world, and 
general regeneration which is to be effected through Albert 
Lasky. This husbandman is an angel named Murifri, to whom, 
at the close of this interview, Dee, descending to more common- 
place subjects, presented petitions for a woman who in a fit of 
desperation had attempted to commit suicide, and for another 
who had dreamed of a treasure buried in a cellar. Several fol- 
lowing revelations relate chiefly to the state of the world, to the 



QUARRELS OF DEE AND KELLY. 149 

approaching revolution and regeneration, and to a book of the 
new law which was to be communicated to them. Another 
spirit, in the form of a maiden, named Galuah, shov/s herself, 
and gives them still more definite information on Albert Lasky's 
future fortunes. 

" Gal. . . . I say unto thee, his name is in the book of life. 
The svm shall not passe his course before he be a king. His 
counsel shall breed alteration of his state ; yea of the whole 
world. What wouldst thou know of him? 

" D. If his kingdom shall be of Poland, or what land else ? 

" Gal. Of two kingdoms. 

" D. Which, I beseech you ? 

" Gal. The one thou hast repeated, and the other he seeketh 
as right. 

" D. God grant him sufficient direction to do all things so as 
may please the highest of his calling. 

" Gal. He shall want no direction in anything he desireth. 

" D. As concerning the troubles of August next, and the dan- 
gers then, what is the best for him to do ? to be going home be- 
fore, or to tarry here ? 

" Gal. Whom God hath armed, no man can prevail against." 

Kelly now again began to pretend scruples as to the propriety 
of their dealing with the spirits, whom he believed were devils ; 
and he threatened once or twice to 'desert the doctor, who, how- 
ever, kept a close watch upon him. One day, at the end of 
June, Kelly announced his intention of riding on some business 
or other from Mortlake to Islington. " My heart did throb often- 
times this day," says Dee, " and thought that Edward Kelly did 
intend to absent himself from me, and now upon this morning I 
was confirmed, and more assured that it was so ; whereupon 
seeing him make such haste to ride to Islington, I asked him 
why he so hasted to ride thither, and I said, ' If it were to ride 
to Mr. Harry Lee, I would go thither also to be acquainted with 
him, seeing now I had so good leisui'e, being eased of the book- 
writing.' Then he said, that one told him the other day that 
the duke [Lasky] did but flatter him, and told him other things 
both against the duke and me. I answered for the duke and 
myself, and also said, that if the forty pounds annuity which Mr. 
Lee did offer hira, v/as the chief cause of his minde setting that 
way (contrary to many of his former promises to me), that then 
I would assure him of fifty pounds yearly, and would do my best, 
by following of my sute, torbring it to passe as soon as possibly 
I could;' and thereupon did mnke him promise upon the Bible. 

13* 



]50 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Then Edward Kelly again upon the same Bible did swear unto 
me constant friendship, and never to forsake me ; and moreover 
said, ' that unlesse this had. so fain out, he would have gone be- 
yond the seas, taking ship at Newcastle within eight days next.' 
And so we plight our faith each tp other, taking each other by 
the hand upon these points of brotherly and friendly fidelity 
during life, which covenant I beseech God to turn to his honor, 
glory, and service, and the comfort of our brethren (his chil- 
dren) here in earth." 

Kelly seems at this time to have been unhappy in his domestic 
affairs, and to have been in fear of arrest, and he still talked of 
leaving Dee's service. In a fit of anger, at the beginning of 
July, he offered to release Dee of his engagement of fifty pounds 
a year,- declared that he hated his own wiie, and wished to be 
away. All this, except the want of love for his wife, was mere 
dissimulation ; he did not go, but in the next conference with 
the spiritual world, he declared that he had been rebuked for his 
discontent. 

At length, all preparations having been made for the journey. 
Dee and Kelly, with their two wives and families, left Mortlake 
to accompany Albert Lasky into Poland, where they hoped to 
share in the great fortunes which had been promised him. They 
consulted their spirits, even when at sea, and apparently with 
the utmost satisfaction. They landed at the Brill on the 30th of 
the same month, and proceeded through Holland and Friesland 
to Embden and Bremen, and so to Lubeck, where they remained 
during the latter part of November and the beginning of Decem- 
ber. On Christmas-day they reached Stettin in Pomerania, 
where they remained till the middle of January. During their 
travels, they were favored with many wonderful revelations of 
events which were soon to occur, most of them pointing to the 
extraordinary fortunes which awaited the Polish prince. 

At Stettin, on the 13th of January, the angel Uriel appeared 
to them, and assured them of the approaching advent of anti- 
christ. Early in February, they reached Lasco, the prince's 
lordship, and here they began to be affected w.ith doubts if Al- 
bert Lasky were indeed the destined regenerator. They seem 
to have been deceived as to his riches and power, and it was re- 
vealed to them that on account of his faults he had been in part 
rejected, but that he would eventually obtain the kingdom of 
Moldavia. Dee was now directed by the spirits to leave Lasco, 
and take up hi^ residence at Cracow. Thither accordingly they 
all repaired toward the middle of the March of 1584, and they 



QUARRELS OF DEE AND KELLY. 151 

remained there till the end of July. During this period the 
doubts relating to Lasky produced an almost daily appeal to the 
spirits. Sometimes the Polish prince seemed restored to favor, 
at other times he was in discredit, until at length, after Dee and 
his party had been reduced to great distress for want of money, 
Lasky's final rejection was announced, and Dee was sent with 
a divine message to the emperor Rodolph. Dee and Kelly were 
at the same time directed by their spirits to remove from Cra- 
cow to Prague. 

During their residence at Cracow, there were several violent 
disputes between Dee and Kelly, resulting from the pretended 
doubts of the latter as to the character of the spirits with whom 
they conversed. The object of these doubts was evidently to 
drag Dee more entirely into Kelly's power, by practising upon 
his credulity. On the 23d of May, Dee has noted that " there 
happened a great storm or temptation to Edward Kelly of doubt- 
ing and misliking our instructors and their doings, and of con- 
temning and condemning anything that I knew or could do. I 
bare all things patiently for God his sake." When Kelly pro- 
ceeded to consult the spirits, he was rebuked for his doubts. 
Next day, these doubts returned, and he refused to continue his 
performances. But on the 28th of May, he performed the office 
of skryer again, and was further rebuked for his disbelief. At 
the beginning of June, Kelly is represented as being entirely 
converted from his evil thoughts ; yet about a fortnight afterward 
we find him again in " great temptation," which was followed 
by another declaration of penitence. 

At Prague the visions of political changes in the world became 
again more frequent and vivid ; but, though Dee was received 
at the imperial court with respect as a philosopher of reputation, 
he appears to have been regarded only as a visionary dreamer 
in respect of his pretended mission. At this period, hints were 
now and then thrown out by the spirits of Dee's ^own unworthi- 
ness, because he was not always sufficiently credulous and 
obedient, and denunciations were pronounced against the em- 
peror. 

During the time of which, we are now speaking. Dee and his 
party were often in great poverty, and we are therefore not sur- 
prised at the anxiety he frequently evinced to obtain the knowl- 
edge of the philosopher's stone, which was now a great object 
of their search. According to a story preserved by Lilly, Kelly 
cheated his master of this knowledge, and appropriated the dis- 
covery to himself. Frequent quarrels occurred at this time be- 



152 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

tween Dee and Kelly, and the doctor appears to have been afraid 
of losing his assistant. 

In the May of 1586, the bishop of Placenza, who was residing 
in Austria as apostolical nuncio, procured from the emperor an 
order forbidding Dee to remain any longer in his dominions ; upon 
vi'hich he went to Erfurdt, and being ill-received there, proceed- 
ed to Cassel. Dee appears to have harbored at this time the 
project of going to Italy, but he was deterred by the intelligence 
that he had been accused at Rome of heresy and magic. In the 
autumn of 1586, Kelly left Dee for a time to repair to Bohemia ; 
and when the emperor's orders against the conjurers appear to 
have been relaxed, Dee followed him. In 1587, they were at 
the castle of Trebone, in Bohemia, again consulting the spirits, 
but with less satisfaction than ever. In the April of the year 
last mentioned, Kelly appears to have made up his mind to resign 
his office of " skryer," and they proceeded to initiate Dee's son, 
Arthur, into the mystery, but as it would seem without much 
success. 

So far, Dr. Dee appears to have been the mere tool of Kelly's 
ambition, and now that there seemed to be no longer hopes of 
success in their designs, the " skryer" determined to leave him. 
He prepared, however, one last trial for his master's credulity. 
Mrs. Jane Dee was of the same age as Kelly, and was conse- 
quently much younger than her husband. Kelly had often pro- 
fessed dislike to his own wife, but he appears to have had other 
feelings toward the wife of his employer. On the 18th of April, 
1587, while they were still at Trebone, in Bohemia, a revelation 
was made in the glass to the effect that it was God's pleasure the 
two philosophers should have a community of wives. Dee was 
shocked, and Kelly professed the utmost abhorrence to that doc- 
trine, yet the revelations were repeated ; they were told that sin 
was but a relative thing, and could not be bad if ordered or al- 
lowed by God, with other doctrines of the anabaptists of those 
days, and of the socialists of the present ; and finally, they opened 
the secret to their wives, and obtained their concurrence, though 
not without some reluctance. Dee has noted in the journal of 
his proceedings, " That on Sunday, the 3d of May, anno, 1587 
(by the new account), I, John Dee, Edward Kelly, and our two 
wives, covenanted with God, and subscribed the same, for indis- 
soluble and inviolable unities, charity, and friendship keeping, 
between us four, and all things between us to be common, as 
God by sundry means v/illed us to do." 

During the remainder of this year, having obtained money for 



KELLY'S DEATH. 153 

their necessities, they were occupied in alchemical labors, which 
Kelly appears to have pursued with much zeal during their long 
residence at Trebone, where they had several quai-rels, and 
where, as far we can gather from some notices in the journal ed- 
ited by Mr. Halliweli, the new arrangement had given rise to jeal- 
ousies between the two ladies. In 1589, Dee proceeded to Bre- 
men, and his eyes now appear to have been turned toward Eng- 
land. His character had been branded in Germany, and he had 
heard during his absence, not onlj^ that the queen was displeased 
at his departure, hut that he was threatened on his return with 
prosecution on the charge of being a conjurer. We have seen 
him wandering about the centre of Europe, sometimes travelling 
with the pomp of a prince, and at others penniless, reckoning in 
vain on the protection of the great, and deceived and deluded by 
those about him. Disappointed, mortified, and dispirited, deserted 
even by his own servants and companions, at length, in the No- 
vember of 1589, he resolved to return to his own country, and 
he landed at Gravesend on the 2d of December, after an absence 
of six years. Before the end of the year Dee was again settled 
at Mortlake, pursuing his old studies. 

Kelly, who had been knighted in German)^, remained behind, 
having, as it appears, impressed the emperor Rodolph, vt^ith the 
belief that he had proceeded so far in alchemical knowledge as 
to be able to make gold. The emperor kept him about his court, 
most of the time under restraint, and sometimes actually in pris- 
on. At length, in the year 1593, endeavoring to make his es- 
cape by night, Kelly fell from the wall of his house in Prague, 
and received injuries of which he died. 

Dr. Dee was received by Elizabeth with kindness, but he had 
lost the respect with which he was formerly regarded. He was 
gradually neglected, and left exposed to the ill-nature of his ene- 
mies. In 1594, he was obliged to write a tract, calling attention 
to his writings and his discoveries, and protested against the opin- 
ion then generally entertained that he was a conjurer. The 
queen at length took compassion on him, and after many troubles 
he v/as appointed and instituted warden of the college at Man- 
chester. After the loss of Kelly, Dee obtained other " skryers," 
and continued his " actions," with the spirits to the time of his 
death ; though their revelations had now,lost all their imagina- 
tive character, and consisted chiefly in answer to questions about 
thefts, hidden treasures, and such commonplace matters. Un- 
der James, he still received protection from the court, although 
his reputation as a conjurer and magician increased. On the 5th 



154 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

of June, 1604, we find liim presenting a petition to the king at 
Greenwich, imploring his aid against the injurious imputation of 
being" " a conjurer, or caller, or invocator of devils," and assu- 
ring his majesty that none " of all the great number of the various 
strange and frivolous fables or histories reported and told of him 
(as to have been of his doing), were true." This petition is said 
to have been one of the causes of an act then passed against per- 
sonal slander, which had an especial reference to the case of Dr. 
Dee. But even this did not mend his reputation, though it pro- 
duced from the aged philosopher the following doggerel lines, 
which show that he was still less a poet than a conjurer : — 

" TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE COMMONS IN THE 
PRESENT PARLIAMENT. 

" The honor due unto you all, 
And reverence, to you each one 
I do first yeeld most speciall ; 
Grant me this time, to heare my mone. 

" Now (if you will) full -well you may 
Fowle sclaundrous tongues for ever tame ; 
And helpe the trueth to bearo some sway, 
In just defence of a good name ; 

" Halfe hundred yeeres, which hath had wrong, 
By false hglit tongues and divelish hate; 

helpe tryde trueth to become strong, 
So God of trueth will blesse your state. 

"In sundry sorts this sclaunder great 
(Of conjurer) I have sore blamde ; 
But wilfull, rash, and spitefull heat 
Doth nothing cease to be enflamde. 

" Your helpe, therefore, by wisdom's lore, 
And by your powre, so great and sure, 

1 humbly crave, that ever more 
This hellish wound I shall endure. 

"And so your act, with honor great, 
All ages will hereafter praj'se ; 
And trueth, that sitts in heavenly seat. 
Will, in like case, your comforts rayse. 
"June 8, 1604."* 

In the subscription to this singular document. Dr. Dee describes 
himself as " mathematician to his most royal majesty." He died 
at Mortlake, in 1608, it issaid in great poverty; but he left be- 
hind him many victims to the same delusions, though few so 

* These verses, and Dee's petition, were printed in the shape of hand-bills, copies 
of which ai-e preserved in the British museum. 



WILLIAM LILLY. 155 

honest as himself. Of these, one of the most remarkable was 
Simon Fornian, who has a melancholy celebrity as connected 
with the crimes of the reign of James I., and who was succeeded 
by the still more remarkable characters, William Lilly and Elias 
Ashmole. The first half of the seventeenth century was the age 
of the English magicians. 

The autobiography of William Lilly is a singular picture of 
the credulity of Englishmen at this period. In his younger days 
he was acquainted with Forman, of whom he has preserved sev- 
eral anecdotes, and he assures us that he had seen one of his 
magical books, in which was written with his own hand, " This 
I made the devil write with his own hands in Lambeth Fields, in 
1596, in June or July, as I now remember." His own instructor 
in astrolog}-, Evans, was less fortunate in an adventure with the 
evil one in the same neighborhood, which seems to have been 
celebrated as a scene of such transactions. " Some time before 
I became acquainted with him," says Lilly, "he then living in 
the Minories, was desired by the Lord Bothwell and Sir Kenelm 
Digby, to show them a spirit. He promised so to do ; the time 
came, and they were all in the body of the circle, when lo; upon, 
a sudden, after some time of invocation, Evans was taken from 
out the room, and carried into the field near Battersea Causeway, 
close to the Thames. Next morning, a countryman going by to 
his labor, and espying a man in black clothes, came unto him 
and awaked him, and asked him how he came there ? Evans by 
this understood his condition, inquired where he was, how far 
from London, and in what parish he was ; which, when he un- 
derstood, he told the laborer he had been late at Battersea the 
night before, and by chance was left there by his friends. Sir 
Kenelm Digby and the Lord Bothwell went home without any 
harm, and came next day to hear what was become of him ; just 
as they, in the afternoon, came into the house, a messenger came 
from Evans to his wife, to come and join him at battersea. I 
inquired upon what account the spirit carried him away ; who 
said he had not, at the time of invocation, made any sufl^umiga- 
tion, at which the spirits were vexed." . 

One night Lilly went a treasure-hunting. It was in 1634, the 
year of his second marriage. " Uavy Ramsey, his majesty's 
clock-maker, had been informed that there was a great quantity 
of treasure buried in the cloister of Westminster Abbey ; he ac- 
quaints Dean Williams therewith, who was also then bishop of 
Lincoln ; the dean gave him liberty to search after it, with this 
proviso, that if any was discovered, his church should have a 



IJG SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

share of it. Davy Ramsey finds out one John Scott, who pre- 
tended the use of the Mosaical rods, to assist him herein ; I was 
desired to join with him, unto which I consented. One winter's 
night, Davy Ramsey, with several gentlemen, myself and Scott, 
entered the cloisters. We played the hazel-rod round about the 
cloisters ; upon the west side of the cloisters the rods turned one 
over another, an argument that the treasure was there. The 
laborers digged at least six foot deep, and then we met with a 
coffin ; but in regard it was not heavy, we did not open, which 
we afterward much repented. From the cloisters we went into 
the abbey-church, where, upon a sudden (there being no wind 
when we began), so fierce, so high, so blustering and loud a 
wind did roar, that we verily believed the west end of the church 
would have fallen upon us ; our rods would not move at all ; the 
candles and torches, all but one, were extinguished, or burned 
very dimly. John Scott, my partner, was amazed, looked pale, 
knew not what to think or do, until I gave directions, and com- 
menced to dismiss the demons ; Vvdiich, when done, all was quiet 
again, and each man returned unto his lodging late, about twelve 
o'clock at night. I could never since be induced to join with 
any in such like actions." Lilly adds in a note, " Davy Ramsey 
brought a half quartern sack to put the treasure in." 

Another of Lilly's magicians was William Hodges, who was 
also an intimate friend of John Scott. " Scott having some oc- 
casions into Staffordshire, addressed himself for a month or six 
weeks to Hodges, assisted him to dress his patients, let blood, 
&c. Being to return to J^ondon, he desired Hodges to show 
him the person and feature of the woman he should marry. 
Hodges carries him into a field not far from his house, pulls out 
his crystal, bids Scott set his foot to his, and, after a while, 
wishes him to inspect the crystal, and observe what he saw 
there. ' I see,' saith Scott, ' a ruddy-complexioned wench in a 
red waistcoat, drav/ing a can of beer.' — ' She must be your wife,' 
said Hodges. 'You are mistaken, sir,' said Scott; 'I am, so 
soon as I come to Ijondon, to marry a tall gentlewoman in the 
Old Bailey.' — ' You must marry the red waistcoat,' said Hodges. 
Scott leaves the country, comes up to London, finds his gentle- 
woman married : two years after going into Dover, in his return, 
he refreshed himself at an inn in Canterbury, and as he came 
into the hall, or first room thereof, he mistook the room, and 
went into the buttery, where he espied a maid, described by 
Hodges as before said, drawing a can of heer, &c. He then 
more narrowly viewing her person and habit, found her iu all 



SAEAH SXELHOSX. 157 

parts to be the same Hodges Itad described ; after "whicli lie be- 
came a suiter unto her, and was married unto her ; which wo- 
man I have often seen. This Scott related unto me several 
times, being a very honest person, and made great conscience 
of what he spoke. Another story of him is as followeth, which 
I had related from a person which well knew the truth of it. A 
Deighbor gentleman of Hodge's lost his horse ; who having 
Hodges advice for recovery of him, did again obtain him. Some 
years after, in a frolic, he thought to abuse him, acquainting a 
neighbor therewith, viz., that he had formerly lost a horse, went 
to Hodges, recovered him again, but saith it was by chance ; ' I 
might have had him without going unto him : come, let's go, I 
will now put a trick upon him ; I will have some boy or other 
at the town's-end with mr horse, and then go to Hodges and 
inquire for him.' He did so, gave his horse to a youth, with 
orders to walk him till he returned. Away he goes with his 
friend, salutes ^,lT. Hodcres, thanks him for his former courtesy, 
and now desires the like, having lost a horse very lately. 
Hodges, after some time of pausing, said, ' Sir, your horse is 
lost, and never to be recovered.' ' I thought what skill you had,' 
replies the gallant, ' my horse is walking in a lane at the town's 
end.' With that Hodges swore (as he was too much given unto 
that vice), ' Your horse is gone, and you will never have him 
again.' The gentleman parted in great derision of Hodges, and 
went where he left his horse ; when he came there, he found 
the boy fast asleep upon the ground, the horse gone, the boy's 
arm in the bridle. He returns again to Hodges, desiring his 
aid, being sorry for his former abuse. Old Will swore like a 
devil. This business ended not* so ; for the malicious man 
brought Hodges into the star-chamber, bound him over to the as- 
sizes, put Hodges to great expenses : but, by means of the Lord 
Dudley, if I remember aright, or some other person thereabouts, 
he overcame the gentleman, and was acquitted." 

One of Lilly's acquaintance was a female " skryer ;" which is 
singular enough, since Dr. Dee's spirits told him, on one occa- 
sion, that females were not admitted to these mvsteries. " I 
was very familiar," he says, " with one Sarah Ske'.hom, who 
had been speculatris unto one Arthur Gauntlet about Gray's Inn 
Lane, a very lewd fellow, professing physick. This Sarah had 
a perfect sight, and indeed the best eves for that purpose I ever 
yet did see. Gauntlet's books, after he was dead, were sold, 
after I had perused them, to my scholar Humphreys ; there were 
rare notions in them. This Sarah lived a long time, even until 

14 



158 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

her death, with one Mrs. Stockman in the Isle of Purbeck, and 
died about sixteen years since. Her mistress one time being 
desirous to accompany her mother, the Lady Beconsfield, unto 
London, who lived twelve miles from her habitation, caused 
Sarah to inspect her crystal, to see if she, viz., her mother, was 
gone, yea or not: the angels appeared, and shewed her mother 
opening a trunk, and taking out a red waistcoat, whereby she 
perceived she was not gone. Next da,y she went to her mother's, 
and there, as she entered the chamber, she was opening a trunk, 
and had a red waistcoat in her hand. Sarah told me oft, the an- 
gels would for some years follow her, and appear in every room 
in the house, until she was weary of them. This Sarah Skel- 
horn her call unto the crystal began, ' OA ye good angels, only and 
only' &c. Ellen Evans, daughter of my tutor Evans, her call 
unto the crystal was this : ' O tu Micol, O tu Micol, regina pig- 
meorum, veni,'' &c. Since I have related of the queen of the 
fairies, 1 shall acquaint you, that it is not for every one, or every 
person, that these angelical creatures will appear unto, though 
they may say over the call, over and over, or indeed is it given 
to very many persons to endure their glorious aspects ; even very 
many have failed just at that present when they are ready to 
manifest themselves ; even persons otherwise of undaunted spir- 
its and firm resolution are herewith astonished, and tremble, as 
it happened not many years since with us. A very sober dis- 
creet person, of virtuous life and conversation, was beyond 
measure desirous to see something in this nature. The queen 
of fairies was invucated ; a gentle murmuring wind came first ; 
after that, among the hedges, a smart whirlwind; by-and-by a 
strong blast of wind blew upon the face of the friend, — and the 
queen appearing in a most illustrious glory, ' No more, I beseech 
you !' quoth the friend. — ' My heart fails ; I am not able to en- 
dure longer.' Nor was he ; his black curling hair rose up, and 
I believe a buUrush would have beat him to the ground ; he was 
soundly laughed at, &c. Sir Robert Holborn, knight, brought 
one unto me. Glad well of Suffolk, who had formerly had sight 
and conference with Uriel and Raphael, but lost them both by 
carelessness ; so that neither of them both would but very rarely 
appear, and then presently be gone, resolving nothing. He 
would have given me two hundred pounds to have assisted him 
for their recovery, but I am no such man. Those glorious 
creatures, if well commanded, and well observed, do teach the 
master anything he desires ; Amant secreta, fugiunt aperta. The 
fairies love the southern side of hills, mountains, and groves. 



DEE'S BOOK PUBLISHED. 159 

Neatness and cleanliness in apparel, a strict diet, and upright 
life, fervent prayers unto God, conduce much to the assistance 
of those who are curious these ways." 

The delusion of this branch of superstition, which more es- 
pecially affected the minds of the learned, neither held its sway- 
so long nor prevailed so generally as the belief in witchcraft. It 
seemed like a visitation of Providence to show that the boasted 
intellect of man was but frailty, and that even the wisest were . . 

sometimes liable to stumble. We must not forget that in l^^^^t ' h^^ 
the learned scholar Meric Casauban, who was a believer in 
many of these wonders, thought the ravings pf Dee and Kelly 
worthy of publication, and that a numerous impression of that 
strange book was quickly bought up. The contemporary pos- 
sessor of a copy now in the British Museum, who had studied it 
and loaded it with manuscript notes, has left the following note 
among other memoranda at the commencement : "I remember 
well when this book was first published, that the then persons 
who held the government had a solemn consult upon the sup- 
pressing it, as looking upon it as published by the church of Eng- 
land men in reproach of them who then pretended so much to 
inspiration : and Goodwyn, Owen, and Nye, &c., were great 
sticklers against it, but it was so quickly published and spread, 
and so eagerly bought up as being a great and curious novelty, 
that it was beyond theyr power to suppresse it." 



CHAPTER XIII. 



THE WITCHES OF WARBOYS. 



In the low grounds of the county of Huntingdon, on the road 
between Huntingdon and Ramsey, and about four miles from the 
latter town, stands the village of Warboys. It is a considerable 
village, consisting of detached houses built partly round the vil- 
lage green, and partly running in a line from the green to the 
church. One of the best houses in the place, which was then 
called a town, was occupied in the latter part of the reign of 
Queen Elizabeth by Robert Throgmorton, Esq., a gentleman of 
respectability, who lived on terms of intimacy with the Crom- 
wells of Hinchinbrook and Ramsey — Sir Henry Cromwell, 
grandfather by his first wife of the protector Oliver, was at this 



160 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

time lord of the manor, — and with the other gentry of the neigh- 
borhood. The family of Robert Throgmorton consisted of him- 
self and his wife, five daughters, of whom the eldest, Joan, was 
fifteen years of age, the. others being named severally Jane, 
Elizabeth, Mary, and Grace, and a rather numerous family of 
servants. 

It was about the 10th of November, 1589, that Jane Throg- 
morton, then a child under ten years of age, was suddenly at- 
tacked with strange convulsive fits, with which she was seized 
several times in the day, and which continued daily and with 
very little intermission. Among the villagers was a laboring 
family of the name of Samwell, or Samuel (as it is spelled in 
the printed record of those transactions), consisting of a man and 
his wife, and their grown-up daughter Agnes, whose cottage 
stood next to that of Robert Throgmorton, and v/ho were in the 
habit of visiting the house to seek employment or the charitable 
hospitality which the poor usually found in the kitchens or halls 
of their betters. One day, soon after the illness of Jane Throg- 
morton, Mother Samwell, as the old woman was popularly called, 
came into the house and seated herself according to custom in 
the chimney corner, by the side of a woman who was holding in 
her arms the child, which was just recovering from one of its 
fits, and it no sooner saw her than it began to cry out, pointing to 
Mother Samuel, " Did you ever see one more like a witch than she 
is ? Take off her black thrumbed cap, for I can not abide to look 
at her ?" Little attention was paid to these expressions at the 
time, except that the mother of the child rebuked it for its cross- 
ness ; and a day or two after, as they found no abatement of the 
child's malady, they sent to Cambridge to consult Dr. Barrow, a 
celebrated physician there, but neither he nor another medical 
man, named Butler, could discover any disease in the child. 

Things went on in this manner for about a month, when two 
other daughters, respectively of the age of about twelve and thir- 
teen, were attacked with sim.ilar fits, and they also cried out on 
Mother Samwell, " Take her awaj^ ! look where she standeth 
there before us in a black thrumbed cap !"- — this was her usual 
head-dress, though it appears that she did not wear it on the pres- 
ent occasion — " It is she that hath bewitched us, and she will 
kill us if you don't take her away!" The parents now for the 
first time began to suspect that their children were bewitched, a 
suspicion which it appears had already been harbored by the 
doctors, though they had concealed it ; and it was increased when, 
a month later, the youngest daughter, who was about nine years 



TEE WITCHES OF WAEBOYS, 161 

of age, was seized with the same fits, and cried also upon Mother 
Samwell. About the same time, the eldest daughter, Joan Throg- 
morton, was attacked in the same manner, and like the others, 
cried after Mother Samwell. 

Joan Throgmorton's fits v^^ere much more violent than those of 
the younger children, and while suffering from them her mind 
seemed to wander, she said strange things, and appeared to hold 
converse with some person or thing v/hich was not visible. 
Among other things, she declared that the spirit told her that 
twelve persons would be bewitched in the house, all through the 
agency of Mother Samwell, and she named the other seven, who 
were all Mrs.. Throgmorton's servants. Accordingly, the ser- 
vants were soon after attacked in the same manner, and called 
likewise on Mother Samwell as their persecutor, saying : " Take 
her away,_ mistress ! for God's sake, take her away, and burn 
her ! for she will kill us all if you let her alone !" The servants 
soon left their places, and no sooner had they done this than they 
were perfectly well, and remained so, while those who came in- 
to their places were immediately exposed to the same attacks. 

It was observable of them all, that when they were out of their 
fits, they were totally unconscious of everything they had said. 

On St. Valentine's eve, the thirteenth of February, 1590, Rob- 
ert Thrograorton was visited by his brother-in-law, Gilbert Pick- 
ering, Esq., of Titchmarchgrove, in Northamptonshire, who found 
the children to all appearance in perfect health. He had, how- 
ever, heard of their condition, and learning on his arrival that 
some of the friends of the Throgmortons were gone to fetch 
Mother Samwell to the house, and finding that they had been 
long with her, he " concluded that she would not come, though 
she had promised that she would come and see them whenever 
their parents should send for her ; and that she would venture up 
to her chin in water, and lose some of her best blood, to do them 
a service. But now her mind, it seemed, was altered, because, 
as she said, all the children cried out of her, and said that she 
had bewitched them, and she also feared that the common prac- 
tice of scratching would be used upon her, which indeed, was 
intended. But both her parents and Mr. Pickeriug had taken 
advice of good divines of the unlawfulness of it. Wherefore 
Mr. Pickering went to Mother SaniM^ell's house, both to see, and 
to persuade her that, if she was any cause of the children's trou- 
ble, to amend it. When he came to the house, he found there Mr. 
Whittle, Mrs. Audley, and others, endeavoring to persuade her, 
but she refused it ; whereupon Mr. Pickering told her that he had 

14* 



162 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

authority to bring her, and if she would not go Avillingly, he would 
compel her, which he accordingly did, along with her daughter 
Agnes, and one Cicely Burder, who were all suspected to be witch- 
es, or in confederacy with IMother Samwell. As they were going 
to Mr. Throgmorton's house, Mr. Whittle and Mrs. Audley, and 
others going on before. Mother Samwell, Agnes SamvA^ell, and 
Cicely Burder, in the middle, and Mr. Pickering behind, Mr. Pick- 
ering perceived that Mother Samwell would have talked with her 
daughter Agnes, if he had not followed so close that they could 
have no opportunity ; and when they came to Mr. Throgmorton's 
door. Mother Samwell made a courtesj^ to Mr. Pickering, offering 
him to go in before her, that she might have an opportunity to con- 
fer with her daughter in the entry, but he refused ; also she thrust 
her head as near as she could to her daughter's head, and said 
these words : ' I charge thee, do not confess anything.' Mr. 
Pickering, being behind them, and perceiving it, thrust his head 
as near as he could betwixt theirs, whilst the words were speak- 
ing, and hearing them presently, replied to old Mother Samwell, 
' Dost thou charge thy daughter not to confess V To which she 
answered, ' I said not so, but charged her to hasten home to get 
her father his dinner.' Whilst these words were speaking, Mr. 
Whittle, Mrs. Audley, and the rest, went into the house, and 
three of the children stood in the hall by the fire, perfectly well ; 
but no sooner had Mother Samwell entered the hall, but these 
three children fell down at one moment on the ground, strangely 
tormented, so that if they had been let alone, they would have 
leaped and sprung about like a fish newly taken out of the water, 
their bellies lifting up, and, their head and heels still remaining 
on the ground." When Mother Samwell was brought to the chil- 
dren, they were violent in their attempts to scratch her, which 
was regarded as a sure sign of her being a witch. 

The next day, Mr. Pickering took Elizabeth Thrograorton 
home with him to Titchmarch Grove, where she remained till 
the eighth of September following, always troubled with her dis- 
order, which attacked her in a variety of ways. Sometimes the 
reading of anything spiritual, or even saying grace at table, threw 
her into a fit immediately; sometimes she would be in a state of 
insensibility except to one thing on which she was occupied ; 
sometimes a particidar game alone kept her tranquil ; at other 
times she was for a long period in violent hysterics, and then she 
woidd cry out against Mother Samwell. On the 2d of March, 
after her arrival at Titchmarch Grove, " all her fits were merry, 
full of exceeding laughter, and so hearty and excessive, that if 



THE WITCHES OF WARBOYS. 163 

she had been awake, she would have been ashamed of being so 
full of trifling toys, and some merry jests of her own making, 
which would occasion herself, as well as the standers-by, to laugh 
at them. In this fit she chose one of her uncles to go to cards 
with her ; and desiring to see the end of it, they played together. 
Soon after, there was a book brought and laid before her, upon 
which she threw herself backward ; but that being taken away, 
she presently recovered and played again ; which was often tried, 
and found true. As she thus played at cards, her eyes were 
almost shut, so that she saw the cards, and nothing else ; knew 
her uncle, and nobody else ; she heard and answered him, and 
no other person ; she perceived when he played foul or stole from 
her either counters or cards, but another might steal them out of 
her hands without her seeing or feeling of them. Sometimes 
she would chide another whom she did see and hear ; sometimes 
a little child, but never above one in a fit. The fifth of March 
she fell into a fit in the morning, and longed to go home to her 
father's. The sixth, one of her father's men came over to Titch- 
march Grove, whom she had often called in her fit to carry her 
to Warboys to her father's, saying, if she were but half way, she 
knew that she should be well. To try this, they carried -her 
toward Warboys on horseback ; and being scarce gone a bow- 
shot, by a pond side, she awaked, wondering where she was, not 
knowing anything, but no sooner the horse's head was turned 
back, but she fell into her fit again ; and for three days after, and 
no longer, as often as she was carried to the pond, she awaked, 
and was well ; but as soon as she turned back again, her fit re- 
turned. The eighth day of March she had a new antic trick ; 
for she would go well enough three steps, but the third she down- 
right halted, giving a beck with her head as low as her knees ; 
and as she was sitting by the fire, she would suddenly start up, 
up, saying she would go to Warboys ; but she was stopped at the 
door, when going out, with a nod she hit her forehead against 
the latch, which raised a lump as big as a v/alnut ; and being 
carried to the pond, and there awaking, she asked how she came 
to be hurt. There she continued all day Avell, playing with other 
children at bowls, or some other sport, for the foolisher sport 
she made use of, the less she was tormented with the spirit; but 
as soon as any motion was made of coming into the house, the 
fit presently took her, so that for twelve days she was never out 
of her fit within doors, eating and drinking in it, but neither see- 
ing, hearing, nor understanding, and without memory of speak- 
ing." 



164 SOECERY AND MAGIC. 

About tlie middle of March, 1590, the Cromwell family, resi- 
ding at this time at Ramsey, Lady Cromwell came with her 
daughter-in-law, Mrs. Cromwell (wife of Sir Henry's son, Oli- 
ver), on a visit to the Throgmortons. She was much afiected at 
the sufferings of the children, and sent for Mother Samwell, 
whom she charged with being the cause of them, using threat- 
ening words toward her. Mother Samwell denied all, declaring 
that the Throgmortons did her wrong, and that they blamed her 
without cause ; to which Lady Cromwell replied that neither 
Mr. Throgmorton nor his wife accused her, but the children 
themselves in their fits, " or rather the spirit within them." A 
divine named Dr. Hall was present, and he and the lady wished 
to examine the accused more closely, but she refused. " When 
the lady found that neither she nor anybody else could prevail, 
and that she wanted to be gone, she suddenly pulled off' her ker- 
cher, and with a pair of scissors cut off a lock of her hair, and 
gave it privatel}^ to Mrs. Throgmorton with her hair-lace, desi- 
ring her to burn them." This was an approved antidote against 
witchcraft. " Mother Samwell, finding herself so served, spoke 
thus to the lady, ' Madam, why do you use me thus ? I never did 
you any harm as yet.' These Avords were afterward remember- 
ed, though not taken notice of at that time." 

Lady Cromwell returned to Ramsey the same day, and " that 
night my Lady Cromwell was suddenly troubled in a dream about 
Mother Samwell ; and as she imagined was mightily disturbed 
in her sleep by a cat which Mother Samv/ell had sent her, which 
off"ered to pluck off the skin and flesh of her bones and arms. 
The struggle betwixt the cat and the lady was so great in her 
bed that night, and she made so terrible a noise, that she waked 
her bed-fellow, Mrs. Cromwell [both their husbands were from 
home], who, perceiving the lady thus disquieted, awaked her, 
whom the lady thanked for so doing, and told her how much she 
had been troubled with Mother Samwell and her cat, with many 
other circumstances, which made her so uneasy, that she could 
not rest all that night for fear of the same." Next day Lady 
Cromwell was seized with an illness from which she never re- 
covered. 

Various other attempts were made to persuade Mother Sam- 
well to acknowledge her fault and relieve the children from their 
sufferings, but for months no attempt was made to press the mat- 
ter against her in a judicial manner, although the fits continued 
unabated. In 1592, the spirits began to show themselves to the 
children in their fits, and sometimes when they were not in theii 



THE WITCHES OF WARBOYS. 165 

fits, and to converse with them m a familiar manner, always ac- 
cusing Mother Samwell, and prognosticating that she would at 
last suifer the reward of her crimes. They began now oidy to 
be quiet when the presumed witch was near them, and it was 
found necessary to introduce her into the house as their nurse, 
which was done much against the inclination of her husband, 
old Samwell. 

The suspicions of witchcraft were now strengthened by the 
occurrences of every day ; Mother Samwell herself was once 
attacked with fits, and she said the house was haunted with evil 
spirits, and she would leave it ; the spirits themselves became 
hourly more familiar ; and new efforts were made to persuade 
the old woman to confess and amend what she had done. Tor- 
mented with these importunities, she one day let herself be per- 
suaded to pronounce an exorcism against the spirits, and the 
children were immediately relieved from their influence. " Mr. 
Throgmorton's face was then toward the children, and his back 
to the old woman, and seeing them start up at once, he said, 
'Thanks be to God!' In the meantime the old woman, fell 
down on her knees behind him, and said, ' Good master, forgive 
me.' He, turning about, and seeing her down, said, ' Why, 
Mother Samwell, what is the matter?' — 'O, sir,' said she, ' I 
have been the cause of all this trouble to your children.' ' Have 
you, Mother Samwell V said he ; ' and why ? What cause did I 
ever give you to use me and my children thus V — ' None at all,' 
said she. ' Then,' says he, ' you have done me the more wrong.' 
' Good master,' said she, ' forgive me.' — ' God forgive you,' said 
he, ' and I do ; but tell me how you came to be such a woman.' 
* Master,' said she, ' I have forsaken my Maker, and given my 
soul to the devil.' Then the grandmother and mother of the 
children, who were in the hall, hearing them so loud in the par- 
lor, came in, whom Mother Samwell asked pardon of likewise. 
Mrs. Throgmorton, the mother, presently forgave her with all 
her heart, but could not well tell what was the matter. Then 
Mother Samwell asked the three children that were there, and 
the rest, forgiveness, and kissed them, the children easily for- 
giving her. Mr. Throgmorton and his wife perceiving the old 
v/oman so penitent and cast down, she weeping and lamenting 
all the time, did all they could to comfort her, and told her they 
would freely forgive her from their hearts, provided their chil- 
dren were no more troubled. She said, she trusted in God they 
would never be troubled again, yet could not be comforted. Mrs. 
Throgmorton then sent for Dr. Dorrington, minister of the town, 



166 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

and told him all the circumstances ; and all of them endeavored 
to make her easy, but nevertheless she wept all that nijjjht. The 
next day, being Christmas even, and the sabbath, Dr. Dorrington 
chose his text of repentance out of the Psalms, and communi- 
cating her confession to the assembly, directed his discourse 
chiefly to that purpose, to comfort a penitent heart, that it might 
affect her. All the sermon-time Mother Samvvell w^ept and la- 
mented, and was frequently so loud in her passions, that she 
drew the eyes of the congregation upon her." 

The next day Mother Samwell contradicted all she had said, 
declaring that she was drawn into the confession by hor surprise 
at finding that her exorcism had relieved the children, and that 
she hardly knew what she was saying. It was believed that 
this denial was the result of a compact with her husband and 
daughter, and all other means proving ineffectual to bring her 
back to her confession, they carried her at the end of December 
(1592) before the bishop of Lincoln. The old woman was now 
thoroughly frightened, and she made a new confession, that she 
was really a witch, that she had several spirits whose names she 
repeated, one of which appeared in the shape of a dun chicken, 
and often sucked her chin, and that they were given to her by 
an "upright man," of whose name and dwelling-place she was 
equally ignorant. On this confession, both mother and daughter 
were committed to Huntingdon jail, but the latter was bailed in 
accordance with Mr. Throgmorton's wish to take her to his 
house, in order to see if her presence would have the same effect 
on his children as that of her mother. 

Dr. Dorrington and a Cambridge " scholar" were also in the 
house, and the evidence of the former as to what happened in 
the house when Agnes Samwell was brought there was of great 
weight against her on her trial. On the 10th of February, 1593, 
according to Dr. Dorrington's statement, " In the afternoon, she 
(Jane Throgmorton) lay groaning in her fit by the fireside, and 
suddenly was taken with a bleeding at the nose, which surprised 
her very much, fearing ill news after it. When she had bled 
much in her handkerchief, she said it was a good deed to throw 
it in the fire and burn the witch. After she had talked thus, it 
appeared that the spirit came to her ; she smiling and looking 
about her, saying, ' What is this, in God's name, that comes 
tumbling to me ? it tumbles like a football, it looks like a pup- 
pet-player, and appears much like its dame's old thrumb-cap. 
What is your name, I pray you V said she. The thing answered 
his name was Blew. To which she answered, ' Mr. Blew, you 



DIALOGUES WITH THE SPIRITS. 1G7 

are welcome ; I never saw you before ; I thought my nose bled 
not for nothing ; what news have you brought ? What !' says 
she, ' dost thou say I shall be worse handled than ever I was ? 
Ha ! what dost thou say 1 that I- shall now have my fits, when I 
shall both hear and see and know everybody ? that's a new trick 
indeed. I think never any of my sisters were so used, but I 
care not for you ; do your worst, and when you have done, you 
will make an end.' After this she was silent awhile, but listen- 
ing to something that was said, presently called for Agnes Sam- 
well, asking where she was, and saying that she had too much 
liberty, and that she must be more strictly looked to ; ' for late- 
ly she was in the kitchen-chamber talking with her spirits, and 
entreated Mr. Blew not to let me have any such extreme fits, 
when I spoke, heard, and knew eveiybody. But he says he 
will torment me more, and not rest till Dame Agnes Samwell is 
brought to her end ; so that now,' says she to Agnes Samwell, 
who was just come to her, ' it will be no better with us till you 
and your mother are both hanged.' The maid confessed she 
was in the kitchen-chamber and alone, but denied that she talked 
with spirits, or knew any such. Mrs. Jane bid her not deny it, 
for the spirits would not lie. Soon after she came out of this 
fit, and complained of great pain in her legs, and being asked 
where she had been, and what she had said, she answered, that 
she had been asleep, and said nothing she knew of, and won- 
dered how her handkerchief came to be so bloody, saying, some- 
body else had bloodied it, and not she, for she was not used to 
bleed." 

The other children were much affected this day and the next, 
and all seemed to conspire against Agnes Samwell ; but it was 
Jane Throgmorton who appears to have been most familiar with 
the spirits. On the 11th of February, she " was sick and full of 
pain all day; when night came, after supper, she fell into her 
fit as the night before, being able to see, hear, and understand 
everything that was asked of her ; and having continued in this 
fit some time, she fell into her senseless fit, and being silent 
awhile, and her mouth shut, she fetched a great groan, and said, 
' Whence came you, Mr. Smack, and what news do you bring V 
The spirit answered, that he came from fighting. Said she, 
' With whom V The spirit answered, ' with Pluck.' — ' Where 
did you fight, I pray you V said she. The spirit answered, in 
old dame's back-house, which stood in Mother Samwell's yard ; 
'and they fought with great cowlstaves last night.' — ' And who 
got the mastery I pray you V said she. He answered, he broke 



168 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Pluck's head. Says she, ' I wish he had broke your neck also.' 
Saith the spirit, ' Is that all the thanks I shall have fur my la- 
bor V — ' What,' says she, ' do you look for thanks at my hand 1 
I wish you were all hanged up against one another, for you are 
all naught ; but God will defend me from you ;' so he departed 
and bid her farewell. Being asked when he would come again, 
he said, ' On Wednesday night.' He was no sooner gone, but 
presently came Pluck to her, to whom she said, ' From whence 
come you. Pluck, with your head hanging down so ?' He an- 
swered just as Smack had told her. Then said the spirit to her, 
' When saw you Smack V She answered, that she knew no 
such fellow. ' Yes,' says he, ' but you do, but you will not be 
known of him.' — ' It seems,' says she, ' that you have met with 
your match.' And after such like expressions, he went away, 
and presently she came out of her fit, and complained of pain in 
her legs. The next day she was very sick all day, it being 
Monday, and in the afternoon fell into a very strange fit, having 
lost all her senses for about half an hour ; Agnes Samwell, see- 
ing the extremity of which, seemed to pray earnestly for her 
along with the rest ; and being asked whether it proceeded from 
wantonness, as she used to say, she could not deny but it must 
proceed from some supernatural power. When the fit was over, 
she was well, except the pain in her legs. After supper, as 
soon as her parents were risen, she fell into the same fit again, 
as before, and then became senseless, and in a little time open- 
ing her mouth, she said, 'Will this hold for ever? I hope it 
will be better one day. From whence came you now. Catch V 
said she, ' limping. I hope you have met with your match.' 
Catch answered that Smack and he had been fighting, and that 
Smack had broken his leg. Said she, ' That Smack is a shrewd 
fellow, methinks I would 1 coirtd see him. Pluck came last 
night,' said she, ' with his head broke, and now you have broken 
your leg ; I hope,' said she, ' he will break both your necks be- 
fore he hath done with you.' Catch answered, that he would 
be even with him before he had done. Then said she, ' Put 
forth your other leg, and let me see if I can break that,' having a 
stick in her hand. The spirit told her that she could not hit 
him. ' Can I not hit you V said she ; ' let me try.' Then the 
spirit put out his leg, and she lifted up the stick easily, and sud- 
denly struck the ground. ' You have not hurt me,' said the 
spirit. ' Have I not hurt you V said she. ' No, but I would if 
I could, and then I would make some of you come short home.' 
So she seemed divers times to strike at the spirit, but he leaped 



DIALOGUES WITH THE SPIRITS. 169 

over the stick, as he said, like a Jack-an-apes. So after many 
such tricks the spirit went away, and she came out of her lit, 
continuing all that night, and the next day, very sick, and full of 
pain in her legs. At night, when supper was ended, she fell 
into her sensible fit again, which continued as usual, and then 
she grew senseless, and after a little time, as usual, fetching a 
great groan, she said, ' Ha, sirrah ! are you come with your arm 
in a sling, Mr. Blew ? Who hath met with you, I pray V The 
spirit said, • You kno\v well enough.' She answered, ' Do I 
know well enough ? how should I know V — ' Why,' said the 
spirit, ' Smack and I were fighting, and he hath broken my arm.' 
Said she, ' That Smack is a stout fellow indeed ; 1 hope he will 
break ail your necks, because you punish me without a cause. 
I wish,' said she, ' that I could be once acquainted with him.' — 
' We will be even with him,' said Blew, ' one day.' — ' Why,' 
said she, ' what will ye do V The spirit said they would all fall 
upon him and beat him. Saith she, ' Perhaps he cares not for 
you all, for he has broken Pluck's head, Catch's leg, and your 
arm ; now you have something to do, you may go and heal your 
arm.' — ' Yes,' saith the spirit, ' when my arm is well, we will 
beat Smack.' So they parted, and she came out of her fit, and 
complained of most parts of her body ; so that she seemed easi- 
er while the spirit was talking with her, than when she came 
out of her fit. The next day, which was Wednesday, she was 
very ill, and \vhen night came, she first fell into her sensible 
fit, and then into her senseless one, and after fetching a great 
sigh, she said, ' Whence came you, Mr. Smack?' He said he 
w^as come according to his promise on Sunday night. Said she, 
' It is very likely you w-ill keep your promise, but I had rather 
you would keep away till you are sent for ; but what news have 
you brought V Said he, ' I told you I had been fighting last 
Sunday night, but I have had many battles since.' — ' So it seems,' 
said she, ' for here was both Pluck, Catch, and Blew, and all 
came lame to me.' — ' Yes,' said he, ' I have met with them all.' 
— ' But I wonder,' said she, 'you could beat them, for they are 
very great, and you are but a little one.' Said he, ' I am good 
enough for two of the best of them together.' — ' But,' said she, ' I 
can tell you news.' — ' What's that V said he. ' They will all of 
them fall upon you at once, and beat you.' He said he cared 
not for that, he would beat two of the best of them. ' And who 
shall beat the other two V said she, ' for there is one who hath 
been often spoke of. called Hardname, his name standing upon 
eight letters, and every letter standeth for a word, but what his 

15 



170 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

name is otherwise, we know not.' The spirit answered that his 
cousin Smack would help him to beat the other two. There 
are also two otlier Smacks, as appears from the old woman's 
confession. ' What V said she, ' will your cousin Smack help 
you? is there kindred among devils? I never heard of that be- 
fore, God keep me from that kindred !' " 

This strange scene was also a part of Dr. Dorrington's evi- 
dence. Things continued thus till the month of April, when it 
was determined again to put in practice the remedy of scratching. 

" On Monday following, which was the day appointed for 
scratching, Mrs. Joan fell into her fit a little before supper, and 
continued so all supper-time, being not able to stand on her legs. 
As soon as they began to give thanks after supper, she started 
up upon her feet and came to the table side, and stood with her 
sisters that were saying of grace ; and as soon as grace was 
ended, she fell upon the maid. Nan Samw^ell, and took her head 
under her arms, and first scratched the right side of her cheeks ; 
and when she had done that, ' Now,' said she, ' I must sci-atch 
the left side for my Aunt Pickering,' and scratched that also till 
blood came on both sides ver}' plentifully. The maid stood still, 
and never moved to go away from her, yet cried pitifully, desi- 
ring the Lord to have mercj' on her. When she had done scratch- 
ing, Mrs. Joan sat herself upon a stool, and seemed to be out of 
breath, taking her breath very short, yet the maid never struggled 
with her, and was able to hold never a joint of her, but trembled 
like a leaf, and called for a pair of scissors to pare her nails ; but 
when she had them, she was not able to hold them in her hands, 
but desired some one to do it for her, which Dr. Dorrington's 
wife did. Mrs. Joan saved her nails as they were pared, and 
when they had done threw them into the fire, and called for some 
water to wash her hands, and then threw the water into the fire. 
Then she fell upon her knees, and desired the maid to kneel by 
her, and prayed with her, saying the Lord's prayer and the 
creed ; but Mrs. Joan seemed as if she did not hear the maid, 
for she would say amiss sometimes, and then the company would 
help her out ; but Mrs. Joan did not stay for her, so that she had 
ended before the maid had half done hers. After this, Dr. Dor- 
rington took a prayer-book and read what prayers he thought fit ; 
and when he had done, Mrs. Joan began to exhort the maid, and 
as she was speaking she fell a weeping extremely, so that she 
could not well express her words, saying that she would not have 
scratched her, but she was forced to it by the spirit. As she was 
thus complaining, her sister Elizabeth was suddenly seized with 



THE TRIAL OF THE WITCHES. 171 

a fit, and turning hastily upon the maid, catched her by one of 
her hands, and fain would have scratched her, saying, the spirit 
said she must scratch her too ; but the co'mpany desired the maid 
to keep her hand from her, so they strove a great while till the 
child was out of breath ; then said the child, ' Will nobody help 
me?' twice or thrice over. Then said Mrs. Joan, being still in 
her fit, ' Shall I help you, Sister Elizabeth V — ' Ay, for God's 
sake, sister,' said she. So Mrs. Joan came and took one of the 
maid's hands, and held it to her sister Elizabeth, and she scratched 
it till blood came, at which she was very joyful. Then she pared 
her nails, and washed her hands, and threw the paring and the 
water both into the fire. After all this, before the company de- 
parted, the maid helped Mrs. Joan out of her fit three several 
times, one after the other, by three several charges ; and like- 
wise brought Mrs. Elizabeth out of her fit by saying, as she hath 
bewitched Mrs. Elizabeth Throgmorton since her mother con- 
fessed." 

The sessions at Huntingdon began on the fourth of April, and 
then the three Samvvells were put upon their trial, and all the fore- 
going evidence and much more was repeated. The indictments 
against them, specified the ofiences against the children and ser- 
vants of-the Throgmortons, and the " bewitching unto death" of 
the lady Cromwell. The grand jury found a verdict immediate- 
ly, and then they were put upon their trial in court, and after 
much evidence had been gone through, " the judge, justices, and 
jury, said the case was apparent, and their consciences were 
well satisfied that the said witches were guilty, and deserved 
death." Afterward their confessions were put in, and " when 
these were read, it pleased God to raise up more witnesses against 
those wicked persons, as Robert Poulton, vicar of Brampton, 
who openly said, that one of his parishioners, John Langley, at 
that time being sick in his bed, told him, that one day, being at 
Huntingdon, he did, in Mother Samwell's hearing, forbid Mr. 
Knowles, of Brampton, to give her any meat, for she was an old 
witch ; and upon that, as he went from Huntingdon to Brampton 
in the afternoon, having a good horse under him, he presently 
died in the field, and within two days after he escaped death 
twice very dangerously, by God's providence ; but though the 
devil had not power over his body at that time, yet soon after he 
lost many good and sound cattle, to men's judgment worth twenty 
marks, and that he himself, not long after, was very seriously 
handled in his body ; and the same night of the day of assize the 
said John Langley died. Mr. Robert Throgmorton, of Bramp- 



J 7-2 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

ton, also said, tliat at Huntingdon and other places, lie having 
given very rough language to the said Mother Samwell, on Fri- 
day, the t(MUh day following, one of his beasts, of two years old, 
died, and another the Sunday following. The next Friday after, 
a hog died, and the Sunday following, a sow which had sucking 
pigs died also ; upon which he was advised, the next thing that 
died, to make a hole in the ground, and burn it. On Friday, the 
fourth week following, he had a fair cow, worth four marks, died 
likewise, and his servants made a hole accordingly, and threw 
faggots and sticks on her, and burnt her, and after, all his cattle 
did well. As to the last matter. Mother Samwell being examined 
the night before her execution, she confessed the bewitching of 
the said cattle. Then the jailer of Huntingdon gave his evi- 
dence, that a man of his, finding Mother Samwell was unruly 
whilst she was a prisoner, chained her to a bed-post, and not 
long after he fell sick, and was handled much as the children 
were, heaving up and down his body, shaking his arms, legs, and 
head, having more strength in his fits than any two men had, -and 
crying out of Mother Samwell, saying she bewitched him, and 
continuing thus five or six days, died. And the jailer said, that 
not long after one of his sons fell sick, and was much as his ser- 
vant was, whereupon the jailer brought Mother Samwell to his 
bedside, and held her till his son had scratched her, and upon 
that he soon mended." 

When judgment of death was pronounced against her, the old 
woman, a miserable wretch of sixty years of age, scarcely know- 
ing what she was doing or saying, pleaded in arrest of judgment 
that she was with child, a plea which onl}' produced a laugh of 
derision. She confessed to whatever was put in her mouth. 
The husband and daughter asserted their innocence to the last. 
They were all hanged, and the historian of this strange event 
assures us that from that moment Robert Throgmorton's children 
were permanently freed from all their sufierings. In memory 
of the conviction and punishment of the witches of Warboys, 
Sir Henry Cromwell, as lord of the manor, gave a certain sum 
of money to the town to provide annually the sum of forty shil- 
lings to be paid for a sermon against witchcraft, to be preached 
by a member of Queen's college, Cambridge, in Warboys church, 
on Lady day, every year. I have not ascertained if this sermon 
is still continued. 



THE POETKY OF WITCHCRAFT. 173 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE POETRY OF WITCHCRAFT. 

The case described in the foregoing chapter gives us a very 
good notion of the general form of witchcraft in England during 
the reign of Elizabeth, and shows us how universally it then re- 
ceived credit from persons of rank. It shows, however, a slow- 
ness, probably an unwillingness, to prosecute, which proves that 
the persecution of the witches was not as yet so general in this 
country as in others. 

In England, indeed, the crime of witchcraft appears to have 
attracted less public attention than in other countries during the 
fifteenth and earlier part of the sixteenth centuries. During the 
former period, however, we have several instances in which, as 
in Scotland, charges of this nature were adopted as means of 
political revenge. In the reign of Henry VI. (A. D. 1441) it was 
made one of the chief accusations against the duchess of Glou- 
cester, the wife of the " good duke Humphry," that she had em- 
ployed a miserable woman known to fame as the witch of Eye, 
and a " clerk" named Roger, to effect the king's death by means 
of sorcery. The witch was burnt in Smithfield ; the sorcerer 
" was brought into Poules (to St. PauVs), and there he stood up 
on high on a scaffold ageyn Poulys cross on a Sunday, and there 
he was arraied like as he schulde never the [thrive) in his gar- 
nementys, and there was honged rounde aboute hym alle his in- 
struraentis whiche were taken with hym, and so shewyd among 
all the peple," and he was eventually hanged, drawn, and quar- 
tered as a traitor ; the duchess was committed to perpetual im- 
prisonment. In Shakspere the sorcerers are made to raise a 
spirit in a circle, who answers to their questions concerning the 
fate of the king and his favorites. In the reign of Edward IV. a 
political party spread abroad a report that the marriage of the 
king with the lady Elizabeth Gray was the result of witchcraft 
employed by the lady's mother, the duchess of Bedford. The 
plot was at the moment successfully exposed, and one " Thomas 
Wake, esquier," was proved " to have caused to be brought to 
Warrewyk ... an image of lede made lyke a man of 
arraes, contaynyng the lengthe of a mannes fynger, and broken 

15* 



174 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

in the myddes, and made fast with a wyre," asserting that it was 
made by the duchess " to use with the said witchcraft and sor- 
sery ;" yet the story appears to have been believed by many, and 
at the commencement of the reign of Richard III. it was revived 
as one of the grounds for condemning the marriage in question 
and bastardizing the children. In this last reign the same crime 
of sorcery formed part of the charges brought against the queen's 
kinsmen, as well as against the frail and unfortunate Jane Shore, 
and subsequently against Archbishop Morton and other adherents 
of the duke of Richmond. The great dramatist has made Rich- 
ard accuse Queen Elizabeth and Jane Shore of a plot against his 
own person — 

" Look l)ow I sm bewitched ; behold mine ai'm 
Is, like a blasted sapling, withered up ; 
And this is Edward's wife, that monstroas witch, 
Cousoi'ted with that harlot, strumpet Shore, 
That by their witchcraft thus have marked me." 

The first act in the statute-book against sorcery and witch- 
craft, was passed in the thirty-third year of the reign of Henry 
VIII. A. D. ] 541, whereby this supposed crime was made felony 
without benefit of clergy. It had probably then been pushed 
into more prominent notice by some remarkable occurrence now 
forgotten. Six years after, in 1547, when the power was en- 
tirely in the hands of the religious reformers under Edward VI., 
his father's law against witchcraft was repealed. Under Eliza- 
beth, in 1562, a new act was passed against witchcraft, punish- 
ing the first conviction only with exposure in the pillory. Dur- 
ing the latter half of Elizabeth's reign, prosecutions for witch- 
craft seem to have become numerous in various parts of the 
country, and the infection was spread by the number of printed 
pamphlets to which they gave rise, and of which many are still 
preserved. Among these are accounts of a witch hanged at 
Barking in 1575 ; of four executed at Abingdon in 1579 ; of three 
at Chelmsford and two at Cambridge in -the same year ; of a 
number of witches tried and condemned at St. Osythe's, in 1582 ; 
of one at Stanmore, and of another hanged at Tyburn, both in 
1585 ; of three at Chelmsford in 1589 ; of the three at Warboys 
in 1593 ; of three at Barnet and Brainford in 1595 ; and of seve- 
ral in the counties of Derby and Stafford in 1597. The fre- 
quency of such accusations at this period, and the number of 
persons who were on such slight pretexts brought to an igno- 
minious death, made witchcraft a subject of discussion, and the 
principles of moderation, which had been espoused by Wierus on 
the continent, found enlightened advocates in this country. In 



NAMES OF FAMILIARS, ^ 175 

1584, Reginald Scott published his " Discovery of Witchcraft," 
in which he exposed the absurdity of the charges brought against 
this class of offenders, and the weakness of the evidence on. 
which they were usually convicted. Scott's book is one of the 
most valuable works we have on the superstitions prevalent in 
England at this time, but, like most other old works, it is com- 
piled, in a great degree, from foreign authorities. The county 
of Essex had been especially haunted by witches, and an intelli- 
gent and noted preacher of Maldon, George Giffard, who be- 
longed in some measure to the same school as Scott, published, 
in 1587, " A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles by 
Witches and Sorcerers ;" and, in 1593, the public received, from 
the same writer, " A Dialogue concerning Witches and Witch- 
craft," of which another edition was printed in 1603. This lat- 
ter edition of a very curious book has been reprinted by the 
Percy Society. 

English witchcraft, at this time, seems to have been entirely 
free from the romantic incidents which formed so striking a 
characteristic of the popular creed in other countries. We have 
no voyages out to sea in sieves ; no witches' sabbaths ; not even 
any direct compact with the fiend. The witches are the mere 
victims of their own vindictive feeling, and find ready instruments 
in certain imps, of a very equivocal character, to wreak their 
malice on man or beast. These imps are represented as appear- 
ing in the form of small animals — generally those which come un- 
der the repulsive title of vermin — or cats, and they serve merely 
in return for their food. They bear undignified names, like Tyf- 
fin, Piggin, Titty, Jack, Tom, and the like. Mother Samwell, 
the witch of Warboys, Confessed that she had nine spirits or 
imps, given her by an old man, and that three of them (cousins 
to each other) were named each of them Smack : the names of 
the others being Pluck, Blue, Catch, White, Calicut, and Hard- 
name. One of the women arraigned at Chelmsford, in 1579, 
was accused by her own son (a child of eight years of age, who 
was examined in court as a witness against his mother), of keep- 
ing three spirits ; one, which she called Great Dick, was en- 
closed in a wicker bottle ; the second, named Ijittle Dick, was 
placed in a leather bottle ; and the third, v/hich went by the 
name of Willet, was kept in a woolpack. " And thereupon the 
-house was commaunded to be searched. The bottles and packe 
were found, but the spirites were vanished awaie." One of the 
v/itches of St. Osythe's had been heard to talk in her house when 
she was knov/n to be alone, and it was at once judged that she 



176 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

then held conversation with her imps. A witness in this trial 
deposed, that on calling one of the accused, and finding her not 
at home, she looked in through the chamber window, and there 
" espied a spirite to looke out of a potcharde from under a clothe, 
the nose thereof beeing browne like unto a ferret." These imps 
were represented as usually making a voluntary offer of their 
services, although they sometimes persecuted their victims until 
they made use of them. One of the Chelmsford witches was 
going from the door of a man who had refused to give her yeast 
for her bread, when she was met by a dog which undertook to 
revenge her on the man who had driven her away empty-handed. 
The imps were often transferred from one person to another. 
' One witch, mentioned in Grifhth's " Dialogue," confessed be- 
fore a justice that she had three spirits : one like a cat, which 
she called Lightfoot ; another like a toad which she called Lunch ; 
and a third like a weazel, which she called Makeshift. She 
said that one Mother Barlie sold her Lightfoot about sixteen years 
before, in exchange for an ovencake, and " told her the cat would 
do her good service ; if she would, she might send her of her 
errand; this cat was with her but a while; but the weazel and 
toad came and offered their services. The cat would kill kine, 
the weazel would kill horses, the toad would plague men in their 
bodies." Another witch had a spirit in the likeness of a yellow 
dun cat, which first came to her, she said, as she sat by the fire, 
when she had fallen out with a neighbor of hers, and wished the 
A^engeance of God might fall on him and his. " The cat bade 
her not be afraid, she would do her no harm, she had served a 
dame five years in Kent, that was now dead, and if she would, 
she would be her servant. ' And whereas,' said the cat, ' such a 
man hath misused thee, if thou wilt I will plague him in his cat- 
tle.' She sent the cat, which killed three hogs and one cow." 
Another woman confessed " that she had a spirit which did abide 
in a hollow tree, where was a hole, out of which he spake unto 
her. And ever when she was offended with any, she went to 
that tre^e and sent him to kill their cattle." The writer above 
quoted, tell^ns that, "there was one Mother W., of Great T., 
which had a spirit like a weazel; she was offended highly with 
one H. M. ; home she went, and called forth her spirit, which 
lay in a pot of wool under her bed ; she willed him to go and 
plague the man. He required what she would give h'm, and he 
would kill H. M. She said she would give him a cock, which 
she did, and he went, and the man fell sick with a great pain in 
his belly, languished, and died." 



WHITE WITCHES. 177 

Siicli is the general picture of the vulgar and unimaginative 
sorcery-creed of England in the reign of good Queen Bess. It 
was extended and imprinted still more deeply on people's minds 
by a class of designing people who profited by their credulity, 
and set up to be what were called " white witches." These peo- 
ple pretended to be masters or mistresses of the sorcerer's art, and 
by some mysterious means to know when people were bewitched, 
who was the witch, and how by their charms to counteract her 
evil influence. Many who had experienced losses, or who la- 
bored under disease, repaired to such persons as these, and they 
hesitated not to charge their misfortunes to any poor, aged, and 
defenceless woman in their neighborhood. Sometimes they 
showed them the witch in a magical glass ; at other times, they 
instructed them in certain charms and other processes which 
would make the witches come and show themselves. The rem- 
edies of the white witch were generally of a ridiculous charac- 
ter, but the popular credulity of the age was open to every kind 
of deception. 

The eflbrts of Reginald Scott and George Giffard, were ren- 
dered ineffectual by the accession of James of Scotland to the 
English throne, who passed a new and severe law against witch- 
craft, in which it now became almost a crime to disbelieve. We 
are told that King James carried his hostility to the writings of 
Scott to the length of causing his " Discovery of Witchcraft" to 
be burnt whenever he had an opportunity. 

It was under the influence of this reign that witchcraft not 
only became a subject of deep public attention, but that it came 
into especial favor among the poets. The vulgar form under 
which it had shown itself in the preceding reign would lead* us 
to look for anything rather than the poetry of witchcraft; but in 
the wilder legends of France and Scotland, there were many 
traits of a highly imaginative and romantic character, which 
made the witches no unfit instruments of supernatural agency in 
the conceptions of the poet. Nature's own bard seems to have 
been the first who called in this new agency to his aid ; and he 
clothed it with new attributes which appear to show an acquaint- 
ance with the ancient popular mythology of the northern people. 
The three witches in Macbeth appear as the weird sisters or fates 
of the Scandinavian mythology, fixing and watching the fate of 
individuals in the hour of battle ; and almost in the same breath 
they answer the calls of their familiar imps, like the witches of 
Elizabeth's time. 



178 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

1st Witch. Wlif^n plinll we tliree meet ngiin, 

III tliunder, llL-litiiiiiff, or in raiu ? 
ScZ Witch. When the huily-buily's done, 

When the batije's lost and won. 
2d Witch. That will he ere set of sun. 
l.st Wir.rh. Where's the place ? 
2^7 Witch. Upon the lieath. 

3d Wi/ch. There to meet with Macbeth. 
1st Witch. I come, Graymalkin ! 
All. Paddock calls. — Anon ! 

On their second appearance, the three witches have been em- 
ployed in occupations perfectly in agreement with their popular 
character. 

l.tt Witch. Where hast thou been, sister? 

2d Witch. Killing swine. 

M Witch. Sister, wliere thou ? 

1st Witch. A sailor's wife had chestnuts in hej lap, 

And mounohed, and mounched, and moanched. 
Give me, quoth I. 

Aroint thee, icitch ! the rump-fed ronyon cries. 

Her husband's tn Aleppo gone, master of the Tiger; 

But in a sieve I '11 thiiher sail. 

And like a cat without a tail, 

I '11 do. I '11 do, and I '11 do. 

When they next come on the scene, we find that they have a 
superior, to whom Shakspere gives the classic name of Hecate, 
and by whose permission it appears that they exercise their arts. 
Hecate meets the three witches — 

1st Witch. Why, how now, Hecnte? you look angrily. 
Hec. Have T not reason, beldames as you are, 

Saucy and over-bold ? How did you dai"e 

To trade and traffic ^vith Mncbeth, 

Tn riddles, and affairs of death ; 

And I, the mi»trcss of your charms, 

The close contriver of all harms, 

W as never called to bear my part, 

Or show the glory of our art ? 

Even Hecate, in the conclusion, confesses to having a familiar, 
to whose call she obeys. 

Hnri?, T am called ; my little .spirit, see. 
Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me. 

Their place of abode is a dark cave, where they mix, in their 
magic caldron, the horrible and loathsome ingredients of their 
charms. 

Middleton, Shakspere's contemporary, whose witch-poetry he 
appears to have imitated, has left a play, entitled " The Witch." 
Here again the abode of Hecate is a cave, and the boiling cal- 
dron figures in it, but the mystic triad of the witches is changed 



MIDDLETON'S WITCHES. 179 

to an indefinite number, four of whom bear the names of Stad- 
lin, Hoppo, Hellvvain, and Puckle ; and their familiars are called 
Tetty, Tiffin, Suckin, Pidgen, Liard, and Robin. It is evident 
from this, and several other circumstances, that Middleton had 
been studying Reginald Scott, and the vi^itch trials of the prece- 
ding reign. In Middleton, the witches require an ointment (like 
the witches of the continent) to transfer themselves to a distance. 
The airiness of Shakspere's creations has totally disappeared. 

Hec. Here, take tins unbaptized brat ; 

(Giving the dead body of a child.) 
Boil it well ; preserve the fat ; 
You know 'tis preoioas to transfer 
Our 'nointed Hesh iuto the air, 
In moonlight nigiits, on steeple-tops, 
Mountnins. and pine-trees, that like pricks or stops 
Seem to our height; high towers and roofs of princes 
Like wrinkles in the earth : whole provinces 
Appear to our sight then even leek fliJceJ 
A russet mole upon a lady's cheek. 
When hundred leagues in air, we feast and sing, 
Dance, kiss, and cuil, use everything; 
M^'hat young man can we wish to pleasure us. 
But we enjoy him in an incubus ? 

We can not but feel the degradation of the classic Hecate, 
when reduced to a vulgar witch, and revenging herself on those 
who had denied her trilling suits : — 

Hec. Is the heart of wax 

Stunk full of magic needles ? 
Stadlin. 'T is done, Hecate. 

Hec. And is the farmer's picture and his wife's 
Laid dovi^n to the fire yet ? 
St.ad. They're a roasting both too. 

Hec. Good ! (exit Stadlin.) Then their maiTows are a-melting subtly, 
And three months' sickness sncks up life in 'em. 
They denied me often tiour, bacon, and milk. 
Goose-grease, and tar, when I ne'er hurt their churnings, 
Their brew-locks, nor their batches, nor forespoke 
Any of their breedings. No-w^, I'll be meet with 'em : 
/- Seven of their young pigs I've bewitched already, 

Of the last litter ; 

Nine ducklings, thirteen goslings, and a hog. 
Fell lame last Sunday after even-song, too ; 
And mark how their sheep prosper, or what sup 
Each milch kine gives to the pail ; I '11 send three snakes 
Shall milk 'em all 

Beforehand ; the dew-skirted dairy-wenches 
Shall stroke dry dugs for this, and go home cursing. 
I '11 mar their syllabubs and swathy feastings 
Under cows' bellies with the parish youths. , 

Hecate, in Middleton's play, has a son named Firestone, who 
wishes his mother dead that he may have her property ; and she 



ISO SORCERY AND ?*IAGIC. 

foreknows that her death will happen that day three years at 
midnight. The next time we are introduced, the witches meet 
in a field by moonlight, prepared to take their accustomed flight ; 
and among the rest, Hecate ascends with her familiar imp : — 

Hec. Now I go, now I fly, 

Malkin, my sweet spirit, and I, 

O what a dainty jjleasure 'tis 

To I'ide in ilie air 

When llie moon shines fair. 

And sing and dance, and toy and kiss 

Over woods, high rocks, and mountains, 

Over seas, our mistress' fountains. 

Over steep towers and tuirets. 

We fly by night, 'mongst troops of spirits. 

No ring of bells to our ears soumls, 

No howls of wolves, no yelps of hounds; 

No, not the noise of water's breach, 

Or cannon's throat, our height can reach. 

The allusions to the great assemblies of the witches become, it 
Avill be seen, stronger and stronger ; but it was left to the genius 
of Goethe to bring on the scene all the marvels and all the 
abominations of the witches' sabbath. 

In the Tempest, the spiritual part of the plot is more delicate- 
ly imaginative. Prospero is the magician in his most refined 
character — a kind of transcendental Dr. Dee ; and Ariel is a 
spirit that has been brought under the witches' power — not a di- 
abolical imp, but one of the fairies or good people, a class we 
have already seen figuring in the witchcraft cases in Scotland, 
and which we shall now find under the same circumstances in 
South Britain. 

Hast thou forgot 
The foul witch Sycorax. ■who with age and envy 
Was^' grown into a hoop ? hast thou forgot her? 

This damned witch Sjcorax, 

For mischiefs manifuLl, and sorceries terrible 

To enter human hearing, from Argier, 

Thou knowst, was banished ; for one thing she did, 

They would not take her life 

This blue-eye<i hag was hilher brought with child, 

And here was left by the sailors : thou, my slave, 

As thou reportst thyself, wast then her servant : 

And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate 

To act her earthy and abhorred commands, 

Refusing her grand bests, she did confine thee, 

By help of her more potent ministers, 

And in her most unmitigable rage, 

Into a cloven pine ; ^^'itIlin which rift 

Imprisoned, thou didst painfully remain 

A dozen years; within which space she died, 

And left thee there ; where thou didst vent thy groans. 

As fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island 

(Save for the son that she did litter there, 



BEN. JONSON. 181 

A freclded whelp, liag-born) not honored with 
A human shape. 

An uuknown dramatist, contemporary with Shakspere and 
Middleton, brought on the stage the popular character of the 
magician, in the play of the Merry Devils of Edmonton.* 

" Rare" Ben. Jonson completes the trio of contemporary witch- 
craft-poets, and a glorious trio it was. Jonson descends entire- 
ly to the supposed realities of the day. The witches in his 
" Masque of Queens," performed before King James, hold a con- 
venticle like those of Lothian, with whose practices his majesty 
was so thoroughly conversant ; and the poet has in the margin 
substantiated almost every word by a mass of learned quotations 
from Bodinus, and Elich, and Remigius, and Delrio, and a 
whole host of foreign writers on the subject of demonology. 
Eleven witches appear at their place of meeting, and finding 
that the one chosen for their president or " dame" is not arrived, 
they join in calling her up : — 

The weather is fair, the wind is good, 
Up, dame, on your horse of wood : 
Or else tuck up your gray frock, 
And saddle your gnat, or your green cock, 
And make his bridle a bottom of thread, 
To roll up how many miles you have rid. 
duickly come away; 
For we all stay. 

" Of the green cock," says Jonson, " we have no other ground 
(to confess ingenuously) than a vulgar fable of a witch, that with 
a cock of that color, and a bottom of blue thread, would transport 
herself through the air; and so escaped (at the time of her being 
brought to execution) from the hand of justice. It was a tale 
when I went to school." 

This is a solitary tradition of the Elizabethan witches, which 
is worth whole pages of the information contained in the printed 
accounts of their trials. After three invocations in the above 
style, the " dame" makes her appearance, and they then relate 
to one another the evil deeds in which they have been employed. 
One had been gathering the mandrake — a plant of superstition, 
and a powerful ingredient in their charms : — 

I last ni^ht lay all alone 

On the gi'ound, to hear the mandrake groan ; 

And plucked him up, though he grew full low ; 

And, as 1 had done, the cock did crow. 

* It may be observed that the legend of Peter Fabel of Edmonton, on which 
this play was founded, was evidently identical with a German popular story, which 
was turned into English verse under the title of" The Smith of Apolda,'' and was 
published in England in a periodical entitled " The Original," and reprinted in Mr. 
Thorns' " Lays and Legends of Germany." 

16 



182 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Another had smothered an infant in its cradle : — 

Under a cradle I did creep, 
By day ; and when the child was asleep 
At nig;ht, I sucked the breath, and rose, 
And iilucked the nodding nurse by the nose. 

Another had obtained the fat of an unbaptized and base-born child, 
which, as we have seen, was a principal ingredient in the oint- 
ment that enabled them to pass through the air to the place of 
their meeting : — 

I had a dagger, what did I with that ? 
Killed an iul'aut to have his fat, 
A piper it got at a church ale. 

Having produced their ingredients, the witches commenced 
their charms and incantations, the object of which appears to be 
to produce a storm. This seems to have been intended to re- 
mind the king of the tempests which he believed the Scottish 
witches had raised to obstruct him on his return from Denmark 
a few years before. The whole concludes with a dance, '' full 
of preposterous change and gesticulation." 

The most pleasing composition of this age, in which the 
agency of witchcraft is introduced, is Ben. Jonson's unfinished 
drama of the " Sad Shepherd." The witch here transforms 
herself first into a raven, then into Maid Marian, and in the se- 
quel it seems that she was to take the form of a hare and be so 
hunted. . These changes she appears to have eflected by means 
of a magic girdle : — 

But hear ye, Douce, because ye ma}' meet me 
In many shapes to-day, where'er you spy 
This browdered belt, with characters, 'tis I. 
A Gypsan lady, and a right beldame, 
Wrought it by moonshine for me, and starlight^ 
Upon your granniim's grave, that very night 
We earthed her in the shades ; when our dame Hecate 
Made it her gaing night over t!ie kirk-yard. 
With all the barkand parish tikes set at her. 
While I sat whyrland of my brazen spindle; 
At every twisted thrid my rock let Hy 
Unto the sewster, who did sit me nigh. 
Under the town turnpike, which ran each spell 
She stitched in the work, and knit it well. 

The Egyptians, or gypsies, occur elsewhere as agents in 
witchcraft. It may also be observed, that the witch spoken of 
appears here much in the same character as in Shakspere and 
Middleton. Jonson's description of the witch's place of resort 
is extremely elegant. 

Within a gloomy dimble she doth dwell, 
Down in a pit, o'ergrowu with brakes and briers, 



THE WITCH OF EDMONTON. 183 

Close by the ruins of a shaken abbey, 

Torn with an earthquake down unto the ground,. 

'Mongst graves and grots near an old charnel-house, 

Where you shall find her sitting in lier fourm, 

As fearful and melanchulic as tliat 

She is about ; with caterpillars' kells, 

And knotty cobwebs, rounded in with spells. 

Thence she steals forth to relief in the fogs, 

And rotten mists, upon the fens and bogs, 

Down to the drowned lands of Lincolnshire ; 

To make ewes cast their lambs, swine eat their farrow, 

The housewives' tun not work, nor the milk churn ! 

Writhe children's wrists, and sucls their breath in sleep, 

Get vials of their blood ! and where the sea 

Casts up his slimy ooze, search for a Aveed 

To open locks with, and to rivet charms. 

Planted about her in the wicked feat 

Of all her mischiefs, which are manifold. 

There, in the stocks of trees, white faies do dwell, 
And span long elves that dance about a pool, 
With each a little changeling in their arms ! 
There airy spirits play with falling stars. 
And mount the sphere of fire to kiss the moon ! 
While she sits rending by the glow-worm's light, 
Or rotten-wood, o'er which the worm hath crept. 
The baneful schedule of her nocent charms. 
And binding characters through which she wounds 
Her puppets, the sigilla of her witchcraft. 

It becarae now a kind of fashion to introduce witches upon 
the stage, and many dramas were produced in which sorcery 
formed a part of the plot. Few of these have been preserved, 
or, at least, are known to exist. None of their writers attempt- 
ed, like Shakspere, to spiritualize the character ; they merely 
proposed, like their descendants of the present age, to profit by 
the mania of the day, and, picturing witches as they were, or as 
they were supposed to be, held them up to the public odium. 
One play still existing, " The Witch of Edmonton," is said to be 
the joint efforts of several authors (among whom is enumerated, 
perhaps falsely, the dramatist Ford) ; it is founded on the trial 
and execution of a vvdtch of that place, named Elizabeth Sawyer, 
in 1622, and its object seems to have been to show that old wo- 
men were often driven to their,presumed compact with the devil 
by persecution. " Mother Sawyer" is introduced gathering 
sticks in a wood, and soliloquizing on her miseiy : — 

And why on me ? w^hy should the envious world 
Throw all their scandalous malice upon me ? 
'Cause I am poor, deform'd. and ignorant. 
And like a bow buckled and bent together. 
By some, more strong in mischiefs than myself. 
Must I for that be made a common sink 
For all the filth and rubbish of men's tongues 
To fall and run into ? Some call me witch, 



184 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

And, being ignorant of myself, lliey go 

AI)OUtto teacli me how to he one ; urging, 

That my bad tongue (by their baii usage made so) 

Forespenks their cattle, dolh bewitch their corn, 

Themselves, their servants, and their babes at nurse. 

This they enforce upon me ; and in part 

Make one to credit it. 

After being interrupted by the entrance of a party of countrymen 
who insult her, she continues : — 

I am shunned 
And hated like a sickness ; made a scorn 
To all degrees and sexes. I have heard old beldames 
Talk of familiars in the shape of mice, 
Rats, ferrets, weasels, and I wot not what, 
That have appeared, and sucked, some say, their blood ; 
But by what means they came acquainted with thera, 
I am now ignorant. Would some power, good or bad, 
Instruct me which ■way I might be revenged 
Upon this chui'l, I'd go out of myself, 
And give tliis fury leave to dwell within 
Tliis ruined cottage, ready to fall with age ; 
Abjure all goodness ; be at hale with prayer ; 
And study curses, impi-ecations. 
Blasphemous speeches, oaths, detested oaths, 
On anything that's ill ; so I mieht work 
Revenge upon this raiser, this black cur. 
That barks, and bites, and sucks the very blood 
Of me, and of my credit. 'T is all one,, 
To be a witch as to be counted one. 

While she is in this temper, the demon appears in the shape of 
a black dog, and finds little difficulty in seducing her to his pur- 
poses. 

A few years after the occurrence which furnished the plot of 
the piece just described, the witches of Lancashire were brought 
on the stage in a similar manner in the joint production of Hey- 
wood and Brome. But there is less of the " poetry" of witch- 
craft in this play, than in one on the same subject composed 
above half a century later by Thomas Shadwell, and certainly 
not one of the worst of the compositions of this dramatist. Shad- 
well professedly collected the materials for his witchcraft crea- 
tions out of the writings of the " witch-mongers," as he calls 
them, and he has turned into verse the qualities which had pre- 
AMous to his time been imputed to the witches of various coun- 
tries and times. 

The poetry of witchcraft forms a marked point of division be- 
tween the English superstitions of the sixteenth century and 
those of the seventeenth. The learned credulity of James I., 
and the influence of Scottish prejudices, had a fatal effect upon 
that and the following age. But our sorcery creed of the sev- 



WITCHCKAFT IN FRANCE. 185 

enteenth century contained so mnch adopted from the recitals of 
foreign writers, that it will be necessary to turn from it awhile, 
until we have passed the channel to pay our respects to the 
sorcerers of France. 



CHAPTER XV; 

WITCHCRAFT IN FRANCE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

In England, as we have seen, the popular creed with regard 
to witchcraft was neither elaborate nor perfect, while on the con- 
tinent, it had been assuming a form far more systematic and com- 
plete than that which it presented at an earlier period. This 
arose on one side from the decrees of ecclesiastical councils, 
which tended more than anything else to impress on people's 
minds the conviction of its truth, and on the other from the 
numerous treatises of learned men who undertook to arrange and 
discuss the various statements put into, rather than extracted 
from, the mouths of the innumerable victims to the superstition 
of the age. This also tended not a little to reduce to one mode 
the popular belief of different countries, and we shall thus find 
that throughout the sixteenth century the sorcery-creeds of France, 
Germany, Italy, and Spain, scarcely differ from each other, and 
we may fairly take the first as a type of them all. 

During the earlier part of the sixteenth century, trials for witch- 
craft in France are of rare occurrence, and there are no cases 
of great importance recorded till after the year 1560. In 1561, 
a number of persons were brought to trial at Vernon, accused of 
having held their sabbath as witches in an old ruined castle, in 
the shape of cats ; and witnesses deposed to having seen the 
assembly, and to having suffered from the attacks of the pseudo- 
feline conspirators. But the court threw out the charge, as wor- 
thy only of ridicule. In 1564, three men and a woman were ex- 
ecuted at Poitiers, after having been made to confess to various 
acts of sorcery ; among other things, they said that they had reg- 
ularly attended the witches' sabbath, which was lield three times 
a year, and that the demon who presided at it, ended by burning 
himself to make powder for the use of his agents in mischief. 
In 1571, a mere conjurer, vv'ho played tricks upon cards, was 
thrown into prison in Paris, forced to confess that he was an at- 

16* 



186 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

tendant on tlie sabbath, and then executed. In 1573, a man -w^h©- 
was burnt at Drole, on the charge of having changed himself into 
a wolf, and in that form devoured several children. Several 
witches, who all confessed to having been at the sabbaths, were 
in the same year condemned to be burnt in different parts of 
France. In 1578, another man was tried and condemned in 
Paris for changing himself into a wolf; and a man was con- 
demned at Orleans for the same supposed crime in 1583. As 
France was often infested by these rapacious animals, it is not 
difficult to conceive how popular credulity was led to connect 
their ravages with the crime of witchcraft. The belief in what 
were in England called war-ioolves (men-wolves), and in France 
lo7ips-garous, was a very ancient superstition throughout Europe. 
It is asserted by a serious and intelligent writer of the time that, 
in 1588, a gentleman, looking out of the window of his chateau 
in a village two leagues from Apchon, in the mountains of Au- 
vergne, saw one of his acquaintance going a hunting, and begged 
he would bring him home some game. The hunter, while occu- 
pied in the chase, was attacked by a fierce she-wolf, and, after 
having fired at it without effect, struck at it with his hunting- 
knife, and cut off the paw of its right fore-leg, on which it im- 
mediately took to flight. The hunter took up the paw, threw it 
into his bag with the rest of his game, and soon afterward re- 
turned to his friend's chateau, and told him of his adventure, at 
the same time putting his hand into the bag to bring forth the 
wolf's paw in confirmation of his story. What was his surprise 
at drawing out a lady's hand, with a gold ring on one finger ! 
His friend's astonishment was still greater when he recognised 
the ring as one which he had given to his own wife ; and, de- 
scending hastily into the kitchen, he found the lady warming 
herself by the fire, with her right arm wrapped in her apron. 
This he at once seized, and found to his horror that the hand 
was cut off. The lady confessed that it was she who, in the form 
of a wolf, had attacked the hunter ; she was, in due course of 
time, brought to her trial and condemned, and was immediately 
afterward burnt at Rioms. 

In 1578, a witch was burnt at Compiegne ; she confessed that 
she had given herself to the devil, who appeared to her as a 
great black man, on horseback, booted and spurred. Another 
avowed witch was burnt the same year, who also stated that the 
evil one came to her in the shape of a black man. In 1582 and 
1583, several witches were burnt, all frequenters of the sabbaths. 
Several local councils at this date passed severe laws against 



THE WITCHES' SABBATH. 187 

witchcraft, and from that time to the end of the century, the num- 
ber of miserable persons put to death in France under the accu- 
sation was very great. In the course only of fifteen years, from 
1580 to 1595, and only in one province, that of Lorraine, the 
president Remigius burnt nine hundred M^itches, and as many 
more fled out of the country to save their lives ; and about the 
close of the century, one of the French judges tells us that the 
crime of witchcraft had become so common, that there were not 
jails enough to hold the prisoners, or judges to hear their causes. 
A trial which he had witnessed in 1568, induced Jean Bodin, a 
learned physician, to compose his book " De la Demonomanie 
des Sorceiers," which was ever aftervv^ard the text-book on this 
subject. 

Among the English witches, the evil one generally came 
in person to seduce his victims, but in France and other coun- 
tries, this seems to have been unnecessary, as each person, when 
once initiated, became seized with an uncontrollable desire of ma- 
king converts, whom he or she carried to the sabbath to be duly 
enrolled. Bodin says, that one witch was enough to corrupt five 
hundred honest persons. The infection quickly ran through a 
family, and was generally carried down from generation to gen- 
eration, which explained satisfactorily, according to the learned 
commentator on deraonology just mentioned, the extent to "which 
the evil had spread itself in his days. The novice, at his or her 
reception, after having performed the preliminaries, and in gen- 
eral received a new and burlesque rite of baptism, was marked 
with the sign of the demon in some part of the body least ex- 
posed to observation, and performed the first criminal act of com- 
pliance which was afterwai'd to be so frequently repeated, the 
evil one presenting himself on these occasions in the form of 
either sex, according to that of the victim. 

The sabbath was generally held in some wild and solitary 
spot, often in the midst of forests or on the heights of mountains, 
at a great distance from the residence of most of the visiters. 
The circumstances connected with it most difficult of proof, yet 
of no small importance in support of the truth of the confessions, 
was the reality and method of transport from one place to anoth- 
er. The witches nearly all agreed in the statement that they di- 
vested themselves of their clothes, and anointed their bodies with 
an ointment made for that especial purpose. They then strode 
across a stick, or any similar article, and, muttering a charm, 
were carried through the air to the place of meeting in an incred- 
ibly short space of time. Sometimes the stick was to be anoint- 



188 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

ed as well as their persons. They generally left the house by 
the window or by the chimney, which latter, for some reason or 
other, was rather a favorite way of exit. Sometimes, however, 
the wiich went out by the door, and there found a demon in the 
shape of a goat, or at times of some other animal, who carried 
her away on his back, and brought her home again after the 
meeting was dissolved. In the confessions extorted from them 
at their trials, the witches and sorcerers bore testimony to the 
truth of all these particulars ; but those who judged them, and 
who wrote upon the subject, asserted that they had many other 
independent proofs in corroboration. 

We are assured by Bodin that a man who lived at the little 
town of Loches, having observed that his wife frequently ab- 
sented herself from the house in the night, became suspicious of 
her conduct, and at last by his threats obliged her to confess that 
she was a witch, and that she attended the sabbaths. To ap- 
pease the anger of her husband, she agreed to gratify his curi- 
osity by taking him with her to the next meeting, but she warned 
him on no account whatever to allow the name of God or of 
the Savior, to escape his lips. At the appointed time they 
stripped and anointed themselves, and, after uttering the necessa- 
ry formula, they were suddenly transported to the lai^des of Bor- 
deaux, -at an immense distance from their own dwelling. The 
husband there found himself in the midst of a great assembly of 
both sexes in the same state of deshabille as himself and his wife, 
and in one part he saw the devil in a hideous form ; but in the 
first moment of his surprise, he inadvertently uttered the excla- 
mation, " Mon Dieu ! oil som7nes-nous" and all disappeared as 
suddenly from his view, leaving him cold and naked in the mid- 
dle of the fields, where he wandered till morning, when the 
countrymen coming to their daily occupations told him where he' 
was, and he made his way home in the best manner he could. 
But he lost no time in denouncing his wife, who was brought to 
her trial, confessed, and was burnt. 

The same thing is stated to have happened to a man at Lyons, 
with a similar result ; and other instances are given by Bodin 
and contemporary writers on the same subject. In Italy, in the 
year 1535, a young girl of about sixteen years of age, in the 
duchy of Spoleto, was taken to the sabbath for the first time by 
her mother, who had cautioned her against making the sign of 
the cross. But when the damsel saw so vast a muUitude of per- 
sons collected together with so much splendor, and Satan seated 
on a high throne, and dressed in garments of purple and gold, 



THE WITCH AT ROME. 189 

she was so much astonished that, involuntarily crossing herself 
she exclaimed, " Jesu benedetto ! che cosa e qicesta .?" The lights' 
and the company suddenly disappeared from her sight, and she 
was thrown with some violence on the ground, where she rec- 
ommended herself to the protection of the Virgin. Toward 
morning an old man and his daughter passed neaMhe spot with 
an ass, and hearing a female voice in a tone of lamentation, he 
approached the spot, and was still more astonished to find a 
young maiden in a state of nudity. She at once told him her 
story, and he gave her part of his garments to cover her, carried 
her home, and two or three days afterward restored her to her 
family, who lived at some distance from the spot where she was 
found, and who supposed she had been carried off by some of 
the many lawless depredators who then infested the country. 
The mother, who carried her to the sabbath, was tried as a 
witch, and burnt. Another learned Italkn writer tells us a no 
less extraordinary story as having happened within his own 
knowledge. A man of respectability, residing at Venice, was 
surprised one morning to find the daughter of an old acquaint- 
ance, who lived at Bergomi, lying naked on one of his beds, 
near the cradle of his infant son. After being clothed and com- 
forted, she told hini that, waking in the night, she had seen her 
mother rise from her bed, strip, and rub her body with an oint- 
ment, and then disappear through the window. Prompted by 
her curiosity, she imitated all that her mother had done, when 
she was suddenly transported into the place where he had found 
her, where she beheld her mother preparing to kill the child in 
the cradle. Her astonishment at this sudden adventure, and the 
fnght caused by her parent's threats, had made her cry out upon 
Christ and the Virgin, when her mother vanished, and she was 
left there in darkness. The man immediately sent a statement 
of this affair to the inquisitor of the district, who seized upon the 
girl's mother, and the latter confessed herself a witch, and said 
that she had frequently been urged by the evil one to destroy the 
child of her acquaintance. 

The Italian trials of this period furnish several similar inci- 
dents. In 1524, Grillandus, one of the most eminent writers on 
the subject, examined a young witch at Rome, concerning whom 
the following evidence was given. She was returning one 
night from the sabbath rather later than was prudent, carried as 
usual on the back of her familiar, when, as they approached the 
town at which she lived, the church bells began to sound for 
matms. The demon in a fright threw her among the bushes by 



190 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

the river side, and fled. At daybreak a youth of the. town, whom 
she knew, passed near the spot, and she called to him by his 
name. Terrified at the unexpected call, at first he was on the 
point of leaving her with as liitle ceremony as the evil one had 
done, till recognising the voice he went nearer, and was not a 
little surprised to see the woman in such a position, with dishe- 
velled hair, and in a state nearly approaching to nudity, and asked 
her how she came there. She replied, in evident confusion, 
that she was seeking her ass. The young man observed that it 
was not usual to go in such a pursuit in the state in which she 
then appeared, and insisted upon a more probable account of her 
adventure before he would lend her any assistance ; and, after 
he had solemnly promised to keep the secret, she confessed the 
truth, and she subsequently gave him more substantial rewards 
for his silence. After a while, however, he incautiously spoke 
of it to one or two of his friends, and it began to be rumored 
abroad, until it reached the ears of the inquisitioners. Then the 
woman was thrown into prison, and her confidant was brought 
forward, and obliged to depose against her. 

With statements like these, sent abroad under the hand of 
men of known learning and station in society, it is not to be 
wondered at if men's minds became irrevocably entangled in 
superstition. 

As the witches generally went from their beds at night to the 
meetings, leaving their husbands and family behind them, it may 
seem extraordinary that their absence was not more frequently 
perceived. They had, however, a method of providing against 
this danger, by casting a drowsiness over those who might be 
witnesses, and by placing in their bed an image which, to all 
outward appearance, bore an exact resemblance to themselves, 
although in reality it was nothing more than a besom or some 
other similar article. But the belief was also inculcated that the 
witches did not always go in body to the sabbath-— that they 
were present only in spirit, while their body remained in bed. 
Some of the more rationalizing writers on witchcraft taught that 
this was the only manner in which they were ever carried to the 
sabbaths, and various instances are deposed to, where that was 
manifestly the case. The president De la Touretta told Bodm 
that he had examined a witch, who was subsequently burnt in 
Dauphine, and who had been carried to the sabbath in this man- 
ner. Her master one night found her stretched on the floor be- 
fore the fire in a state of insensibility, and imagined her to be 
dead. In his attempts to rouse her, he first beat her body with 



THE WOMAN BEATEN. 391 

great severity, and tlien applied fire to the more sensitive parts, 
wliich being without effect, he left her in the belief that she had 
died suddenly. His astonishment was great when in the morn- 
ing he found her in her own bed, in an evident state of great suf- 
fering. When he asked what ailed her, her only answer was, 
" Ha ! nion maistre, tant ■ni'avsz hatue .'" When further pressed, 
however, she confessed that during the time her body lay in a 
state of insensibility, she had been herself to the witches' sabbath, 
and upon this avowal she was committed to prison. Bodin fur- 
ther informs us that at Bordeaux, in 1571, an old woman, who 
Avas condemned to ihe fire for witchcraft, had confessed that she 
was transported to the sabbath in this manner. One of her 
judges, the maitre-des-requetes, who was personally known to 
Bodin, while she was under examination, pressed her to show 
how this was effected, and released her from her feiters for that 
purpose. She rubbed herself in different parts of the body with 
" a certain grease," and immediately became stifif and insensihle, 
and, to all appearance, dead. She remained in this state abotit^ 
five hours, and then as quickly revived, and told her inquisitors 
a great number of extraordinary things, which showed that she 
must have been spiritually transported to far distant places. Thus 
testifieth Jean Bodin. 

The description of the sabbath given by the witches differed 
only in slight particulars of detail ; for their examinations were 
all carried on upon one model and measure — a veritable bed of 
Procrustes, and equall)'^ fatal to those who were placed upon it. 
The sabbath was, in general, an immense assemblage of witches 
and demons, sometimes from distant parts of the earth, at others 
only from the province or district in which it was held. On 
arriving, the visiters performed their homage to the evil one with 
unseemly ceremonies, and presented their new converts. They 
then gave an account of all the mischief they had done since the 
last meeting. Those who had neglected to do evil, or who had 
so far overlooked themselves as to do good, were treated with 
disdain, or severely punished. Several of the victims of the 
French courts in the latter part of this century confessed that, 
having been unwilling or-unable to fulfil the commands of the 
evil one, when they appeared at the sabbath he had beaten them 
in the most cruel manner. He took one woman, who had re- 
fused to bewitch her neighbor's daughter, and threatened to 
drow^n her in the Moselle. Others were plagued in their bodies, 
or by destruction of their property. Some were punished for 
their irregular attendance at the sabbath ; and one or two, for 



192 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

bligliter oncnces, were condemned to walk home from the sab- 
bath instead of being carried through the air. Those, on the 
other hand, who had exerted most of their mischievous propen- 
sities were highly honored at the sabbath, and often rewarded 
with gifts of money, &c. After this examination was passed, 
the demon distributed among his worshippers, unguents, powders, 
and other articles for the perpetration of evil. 

It appears, also, that the witches were expected, at least once 
a year, to bring an offering to their master. This circumstance 
was certainly derived from the earlier popular superstitions ; 
offerings to demons are mentioned frequently in the early Ger- 
man and Anglo-Saxon laws against paganism, and the reader 
will remember the nine red cocks and nine peacocks' eyes 
offered by the Lady Alice Kyteler. A French witch, executed 
in 1580, confessed that some of her companions offered a sheep 
or a heifer : and another, executed the following year, stated 
that animals of a black color were most acceptable. A third, 
executed at Gerbeville in 1585, declared that no one was ex- 
empt from this offering, and that the poorer sort offered a hen or 
a chicken, and some even a lock of their hair, a little bird, or any 
trifle they could put their hands upon. Severe punishments fol- 
lowed the neglect of this ceremony. In many instances, accor- 
ding to the confessions of the witches, beside their direct wor- 
ship of the devil, they were obliged to show their abhorrence of 
the faith they had deserted by trampling on the cross, and blas- 
pheming the saints, and by other profanations. 

Before the termination of the meeting, the new witches, re- 
ceived their familiars, or imps, whom they generally addressed 
as their " little masters," although they were bound to attend at 
the bidding of the witches, and execute their desires. These 
received names, generally of a popular character, such as were 
given to cats, and dogs, and other pet animals, and the similarity 
these names bear to each other in different countries is very re- 
markable. Examples of English names of familiars have been 
given in the last chapter. In France, we have such names as 
Minette (that is, puss), Robin, Maistre Persil, Joly-bois, Verde- 
let, Saute-buisson, &c. ; in Germany, 'the names are Ungluc (that 
is, misfortune), Mash-leid (mischief), Tzum-walt-vliegen (flying 
to the wood), Federwiich (feather-washer), and the like. The 
forms seem to have been generally those of animals ; and they 
are described as speaking with a voice like that of a man with 
his mouth in a jug. 

After all these preliminary ceremonies — or rather the business 



THE DANCE OF THE V/ITCHES. 193 

of the meeting — had been transacted, a great banquet was laid out, 
and the whole conlpany fell to eating and drinking and making mer- 
ry. At times, every article of luxmy was placed before them, and 
they feasted in the most smnptuous manner. Often, however, 
the meats served on the table were nothing but toads and rats, 
and other articles of a revolting nature. In general they had no 
salt, and seldom bread. But, even when best served, the money 
and the victuals furnished by the demons were of a most unsat- 
isfactory character; a circumstance of which no rational explan- 
ation is given. The coin, when brought forth by open daylight, 
was generally found to be nothing better than dried leaves or bits 
of dirt ; and, however greedily they may have eaten at the ta- 
ble, they commonly left the meeting in a state of exhaustion from 
hunger. 

The tables were next removed, and feasting gave way to wild 
and uproarious dancing and reyelry. The common dance, or 
Carole, of the middle ages appear to have been performed by par- 
ties taking each other's hand in a circle, alternately a gentleman 
and a lady. This, probably the ordinary dance among the peas- 
antry, was the one generally practised at the sabbaths of the 
witches, with this peculiarity, that their backs instead of their 
faces were turned inward. The old writers endeavor to account 
for this, by supposing that it was designed to prevent them from 
seeing and recognising each other. But this, it is clear, was not 
the only dance of the sabbath ; perhaps more fashionable ones 
were introduced for witches in a better condition in society ; and 
moralists of the succeeding age maliciously insinuate that many 
dances of a not very decorous character, invented by the devil 
himself to heat the imaginations of his victims, had subsequent- 
ly been adopted by classes in society who did not frequent the 
sabbath. It m^ay be observed, as a curious circumstance, that the 
modern waltz is first traced among the meetings of the witches 
and their imps ! It was also confessed, in almost every case, 
that the dances at the sabbath produced much greater fatigue than 
commonly arose from such exercises. Many of the witches de- 
clared that, on their return home, they were usually unable to 
rise from their bed for two or three days. 

Their music, also, was by no rqeans of an ordinary character. 
The songs were generally obscene, or vulgar, or ridiculous. Of 
instruments there was considerable variety, but all partaking of 
the burlesque character of the proceedings. Some played the 
flute upon a stick or bone ; another was seen striking a horse's 
skull for a lyre ; there you saw them beating the drum on the 

17 



194 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

trunk of an oak, with a stick ; here, others were blowing trum- 
pets with the branches. The louder the instrument, the greater 
satisfaction it gave ; and the dancing became wilder and wiUler, 
initil it merged into a vast scene of confusion, and ended in 
scenes over which, though minutely described in the old trea- 
tises on demonology, it will be better to throw a veil. The witch- 
es separated in time to reach their homes before cock-crow. 

1)1 the intervals between their meetings, the witches passed 
their w-hole time in devising -and performing mischief; and to 
them were ascribed the storms or blights which devastated the 
fields, and destroyed the fruits of the earth ; the loss of cattle or 
of property ; ill-luck, diseases, and death. They thus became, 
among the peasantry, a hateful class; and every mouth was open 
to accuse them, and every hand to persecute. In these respects, 
and in nature of their supposed agency, the witches of PVance 
differed in no respect from those of England. 

'J'he truth of all these wondrous recitals depended, as wmII have 
been seen, entirely upon the confessions of the witches themselves, 
or on the accusations of others equally under arrest as criminals 
of the same description. When we read, in the writers of those 
times, the systematically-arranged directions for proceeding 
against criminals of this class in France, Germany, and Italy, 
we. feel a sentiment of horror in contemplating the utter neglect 
of every principle of justice, and in considering that this arose 
from no deliberate intention of acting tyrannicalh-, but from the 
mere perversion of hmiian judgment, by the extraordinary intlu- 
ence of the lowest class of superstitions. It is difficult to say 
how far, under peculiar circumstances, the credulity of mankind 
may be carried. We frequent!)'-, however, observe in the most 
zealous writers against witchcraft, the involuntary expression of 
a kind of instinctive feeling of the weakness of evidence, while 
they are at the same time crying up for its irresistible force. In 
this feeling, they catch at anything that seems to offer a corrobo- 
ration, with little inclination to examine critically into its truth. 
Popular legends, and old stories and fables, thus often raise their 
heads among the learnedly paraded confessions of the prisoners, 
and helped, no doubt, to confuse and bevinlder the minds of many 
■who entered upon the study of the theological and judicial trea- 
tises on witchcraft, with the real wish to discover the truth. It 
was from tales like those alluded to, current still among the peas- 
antry in every part of the world, that they brought Ibrward what 
they fondly believed were independent proofs of tiie accuracy of 
statements, which otherwise depended only upon the forced con- 



THE WITCHES OF THE VOSGES. 195 

fessions of criminals. From these latter, alone, the public were 
acquainted with the astounding details of the sabbaths. But Re- 
migius, and other foreign writers, brought forward persons who 
were avowedly no witches, and who had accidentally witnessed 
some of the scenes, the description of which by the actors them- 
selves, had caused so great a sensation. The wilds of the 
Vosges were celebrated as the scene of these midnight assem- 
blies ; in the year 1583, the popular festival of the month of 
May was helil, as usual, in the village of Lutzei, at the foot 
of the.se mountains ; and at night, one of the revellers who had 
come from a place called Wusenbach, at some distance in the 
mountains, prepared to return home, his head probably filled with 
the good cheer and revelry of the day. As he was wending his 
way through the higher partof the mountain which lay between the 
two villages, he was surprised by a sudden and unusual whirl- 
v/ind, which the more astonished him as the night was peculiarly 
calm. Anxious to learn the cause of this rinjrulnr interruption, 
his curiosity led him from his path, and, looking into a retired 
nook, he became suddenly aware of the presence of beings of no 
ordinary character. Six women were dancing round a table, 
covered with vessels of gold and silver, and tossing their heads 
in a wild manner ; and near them was a man, seated on a black 
bull, and apparently enjoying the scene, on which he was quietly 
gazing. Of anything beyond this, group, Claude Chote (for such 
was the man's name) was ignorant, for as he bent forward to ex- 
amine them more carefully, whether he made a noise, or uttered 
a prayer, is not said, but the whole disappeared from his eyes. 
After recovering from his astonishment, Claude returned to the 
path, and continued his way ; bnt he had not gone far before, 
like Tam O'Shanter, he found that he was closely pursued by 
the women he had seen dancing round the table, who came on 
wildly, tossing their heads about, and led by a man with a black 
face and eagle's claws. The latter was about to strike Claude 
Chote, when he had the presence of mind to draw his sword, and 
at the sight of the naked steel, his pursuers vanished from his 
sight. The women, however, again made their appearance, in a 
less hostile manner, accompanied by the man whom Claude had 
seen sitting on the black bull, Avhom he now recognised as a per- 
son of his acquaintance, and to whom he made a promise that he 
would be silent on the subject of what he had seen. His perse- 
cutors then left him, and he found that he had wandered far out 
of his way. After his return home he soon forgot his promise 
of secrecy, the story was gradually spread abroad, and Claude 



196 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

was carried before a magistrate, and made a full confession, the 
consequence of which was, that some of the persons he had 
recognised in the mountains were placed under arrest, and one 
of the women, whose name is given, corroborated his story, dif- 
fering only in this, that she said they had pursued him, not be- 
cause he looked at them, but because he attempted to steal a sil- 
ver goblet from the table. Remigius gives another instance, as 
occurring in the year 1590, in the same part of France, and, 
which was most extraordinary, at mid-day. A countryman was 
passing along a path in the woods, when, turning his looks to 
one side, he beheld, in an open field, a number of men and wo- 
men dancing in a circle, all having their faces turned outward. 
This latter circumstance raised his curiosity, and, examining 
them more closely, he observed that among the rest were two or 
three men with feet of goats and oxen. Struck with sudden hor- 
ror, he felt himself fixed to the spot, his legs trembled under him, 
and he screamed out involuntary, " Jesus, help !" The demons 
vanished in an instant from his sight ; but, as they swept by him 
in rising into the air, he had just time to recognise one man as a 
native of his own village. The story was soon made public, the 
spot was visited, a circle on the grass where they had danced 
was distinctly visible, with here and there the marks of hoofs. 
The man who had been recognised was arrested, and his con- 
fession led to the discovery and punishment of several of the 
others, especially of the women. 

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the witchcraft in- 
fatuation had risen to its greatest height in France, and not only 
the lower classes, but persons of the highest rank in society, 
were liable to suspicions of dealing in sorcery. We need only 
mention that such charges were publicly made against King 
Henri III.* and Queen Catherine de Medicis, and that, early in 
the following century, they became the ground of state trials 
which had a fatal conclusion. 

* The following account is taken from one of the libellous pamphlets against this 
monarch, published by the partisans of the Ligne, under the title of" Les Sorcel- 
leries de Henri de Valois, et les oblations qu'il faisoit au diable dans le bois de 
Vincennes. Paris, 1589." 

" On a trouv6 dernierement au bois de Vincennes deux satyres d'argent, de la 
hauteur de quatre pieds. lis 6taient audevant d'lme croix d'or, au milieu de la- 
quelle y avait enchass6 du bois de la vraie croix de notre seigneur Jesus Christ. 
Les politiques [that is, the moderate party] disent, que c'etaient des chandeliers. 
Ce qui fait croire le coniraire, c'est que, dans ces vases, il n'y avoit pas d'aiguille 
qui passat pour y mettre un cierge ou une petite chandelle ; joint qu'ils tonrnaient 
le derriere a ladite vraie croix. et que deux anges ou deux simples chandeliers y 
eussent et6 plus d6cens que oes satyres, estimes par les payens eti'e des dieux des 
for6ts, oil Ton tieut que les mauvais esprits se ti-oaveut plutot qu'en autres lieux. 



THE WITCHES OF LABOURD. 197 



CHAPTER XVI. 

PIERRE DE LANCRE AND THE WITCHES OF LABOURD, 

In the southwestern corner of France, stretching from the 
foot of the Pyrenees to the shore of the Bay of Biscay, border- 
ing on Spain to the south, and extending northward on the flat 
sandy heaths of the Landes, is a small district which, from a 
Roman station named Lapurdum, that occupied the site of the 
present city of Bayonne, received in the middle ages the name 
of Labourd. The country and the people were equally wild and 
uncultivated, the produce of the former consisting chiefly of 
fruits, Vv'hile the latter occupied themselves principally in fishing. 
It was the men of Labourd who, at the commencement of the 
seventeenth century, carried on the fishery at Newfoundland, 
and they are said to have been the first whalers. Their equivo- 
cal position between the two rival countries, France and Spain, 
and their alliance more by consanguinity with their Basque 
neighbors on the other side of the Spanish border than with the 
people to the north, seemed almost to put them out of the laws 
of either — a people separated from the rest of the world. 

Their more civilized neighbors looked upon them with con- 
tempt for their primitive manners, and believed that the demon 
had selected the wild district they inhabited as his favorite re- 
sort. The women, deserted a great part of the year by their 
husbands and sons, who were out on their fishing expeditions, 
were more exposed to temptation than those of any other part of 
France, and the witches of Labourd had become proverbial. 
They, it was said, caused the storms which so often visited the 
Bay of Biscay, and when the fishermen perished in the pursuit 
of their adventurous calling, it was believed that the winds 

Ces monstres diaboliques ont 6t& vus par messienrs de la ville [the leaders of the 
ligue]. . . . Outre ces denx figares diaboliques, ou a tvouve une peau d'enfant, 
laquelle avait ete corroyee ; et sur icelle, y avait anssi plasieurs mots de sorcellerie 
et divers caracteres. . . . Tout ce qu'il allait souvent au bois de Vinoennes, 
n'etait que pour entendre a ses sorcelleries, et non pour prier Dieu." 

Perhaps the t'W'o satyres were antiques, against which the peasantry had al- 
■waysa prejudice. In early times, when people dug up the Roman bronzes or sculp- 
tures, thej- broke them and threw them away in tl;e belief that they v.-ere instru- 
ments of magic. It appears from Mr. Collingwood Brace's excellent work on the 
Roman wall, that this feeling still exists among the peasantry of Northumberland. 

17* 



193 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

which overwhehned them were sent by their wives, who had 
formed other connections in their absence. 

In the year 1609, the subject of sorcery occupied the attention 
of the parliament of Bordeaux, under whose jurisdiction this 
country lay, and it was resolved to attack Satan in his head- 
quarters by purging the district of Labourd of his worshippers. 
For this purpose, a royal commission was given to two cunseil- 
lers, or judges, of the parliament, Pierre de Lancre, and the 
president Jean d'Espaignet, and they went to Ijabourd in the 
month of May, in the year just mentioned, armed with full au- 
tlioriiy to bring all who had been seduced by the fiend to imme- 
diate judgment. The two commissioners remained in Labourd 
four months, at the end of which time they were called away by 
other business ; but their crusade against sorcer}' had been an 
extraordinary active one, and an immense number of wretched 
people were sacrificed to their zeal. Pierre de Lancre, espe- 
cially, became so profoundly learned in the subject of witchcraft, 
that after his return from this expedition, he compiled a large 
book on the subject, which remains as one of the most extraor- 
dinary monuments of the superstition of those ages.* 

De Lancre was astonished at the multitude of sorcerers he 
found within the limits of the small district of Labourd,! and 
that a country so barren in other respects should be fertile only 
in servants of Satan. He attributed this to the barbarous condi- 
tion of the inhabitants, to the deserted state of the women during 
the fishing season, and to the idle and dissolute life of the whole 
population during the rest of the year. He intimates that the 
priests were nearly as ignorant and vicious as the people, that 
they were the usual companions of the women during the ab- 
sence of their husbands, and that, as they allowed them to assist 
in the services of the church, so they joined with them in that 
of the devil, who not only gained possession of the clergy, but 
even of the churches themselves, in some of which he held his 
meetings of Matches. Thus, we are told, Labourd became the 
general refuge of all the demons whom the catholic missionaries 
had driven away from India, Japan, and other distant lands, 
and De Lancre gravely tells us that the English, Scotch, and 
other merchants, who came to purchase their wines at Bordeaux, 

* Talileau f)e I'lnconstance des Mauvais An^es et Demons, ou il est amplenient 
traicte des Sorcies et Denifins. 4to. Paii.s, 1612. 

t Mais de voir tant de demons et mauvais esprits, et tant de snrciers et sorcieres 
confiiiez en ce pays de Luliourt, qui u'e?t qu'uu petit recoiiier de li France, de voir 
que c'est la pepiniere, et qu'en nul lieu del'Europe, qu'on snaelie, il n'y a rien qui 
approche du nombre infiiij' que nous y en avons trouve, c'est la xnerveille. 



PLACES OF ASSEMBLY. 199 

assured liim tliey had seen on their voyage troops of demons in 
the shapes oi monstrous men passing through the air to that 
country. 

" They reckon," says De Lancre, " that there are thirty 
thousand souls in this country of Labourd, counting those who 
are at sea, and that among all this people there are? jf few fami- 
lies not affected with sorcery in some one of their members. If 
the number of sorcerers condemned to the fire is so great, one 
of them said to me one day, it will be strange if I have not a 
share in the cinders. Which is the cause that we see most fre- 
quently the son accuse the mother or the faiher, the brother the 
sister, the husband the wife, and sometimes the reverse. Which 
proximity is the cause that many heads of families, officers, and 
other people of quality, finding themselves entangled in it, pre- 
fer suffering the incommodity that may be in this abomination 
which the sorcerers hold always in some doubt among their ac- 
quaintance, than to see so many executions, gibbets, flames, and 
fires of people who are so near in affin'ty to them. We were 
never in want of proof ; the multiplicity and the infinite number 
caused our horror. On our arrival they fled in troops, both by 
land and by sea ; lower and upper Navarre and the Spanish 
frontier were filled with them hourly. They pretended pilgrim- 
ages to Montserrat and St. James's, or voyages to Newfound- 
land and elsewhere, and they raised such an alarm in Navarre 
and Spain, that the inquisitors came to the frontier, and wrote 
to us, that we would please to send them the names, age, and 
other marks of the fugitive sorcerers, in order that they might 
send them back to us, which they said they would do willingly. 
And we wrote back to them earnestly, that we wished them to 
keep them carefully, and prevent their returning, as we were 
more anxious to be rid of them than to get them back. It is a 
bad piece of furniture, which is better out of the inventory !" 

It w^ a remarkable characteristic of this country that the 
witches^ere usually young women, and many of those tried and 
brought up as witnesses were mere girls. The demons were so 
bold, that they hardly thought it necessary to seek retired places 
for their meetings, but assembled sometimes in public thorough- 
fares. Thus they often met in the place before a church, and in 
the churchyard — even, at times, in the church itself. They had 
held sabbaths in houses in Bayonne and elsewhere. They often 
met near Bordeaux, at the palais Galienne, as the Roman amphi- 
theatre at that place was called. They met not unfrequently in 
the cemetry and in the ruined castle of St. Pe. Most of the 



200 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Avitches confessed that tlieir favorite resorts were at cross-roads 
(carrefoursj. There were, however, two or thre^ principal pla- 
ces of meeting for the grand assemblies, and these were general- 
ly in wild and lonely situations. One of these was on the bleak 
summit of the mountain of La Rhune, overlooking the sea. An- 
other was on the coast of Andaye, where some of the witches con- 
fessed they had been present, when there were at least twelve 
thousand persons assembled. A third was on the landes, at a 
place which was called popularly Lane de Aquelarre, or the lande 
of the goat, as that was the form in which the evil oue usually 
presented himself there. Marie de Naguille, a girl of sixteen 
years, said that her mother used to take her through the air to 
the sabbath, under her arm, having first anointed herself on the 
top of the head with an ointment ; that their sabbath was held at 
a place in the pass of Ustaritz ; and that when they separated 
they often Avent home on foot. A girl of Siboro, of the same age, 
named Jeannette d'Abadie, stated that four years had then passed 
since she was first taken to the sabbath by a woman named Gra- 
tiane. She had since become tired of this life, and had watched 
in the church of Siboro all night, in consequence of which the 
demon came and took her away by day ; and that on Sunday the 
13th of September, 1609, after watching all night, the evil one 
came and took her away at mid-day, in church-time, as she was 
laying asleep at home. S'^he v/ore round her neck a higa, or am- 
iilet against fascination, which was made of leather, and repre- 
sented a hand closed, the thumb passing between two of the fin- 
gers ; it was an article in very common use. The demon tore 
this from her neck, and threw it behind the door of her chamber 
as they went out together. 

Jeannette d'Abadie said that her conductor Gratiane often took 
her to Newfoundland ; that they passed through the air, as though 
they were flying, she holding by the robe of Gratiane ; and that 
they went in the company of other witches. At Newfoandland 
she saw " all sorts of people" from Labourd, who were raising- 
storms to sink the ships and other vessels, and that they thus 
sunk one belonging to Marticot de Miguelcorena, of Siboro, who, 
being a sorcerer, helped to sink his own ship. Several women 
told Marie de la Ralde, a witch examined by De Lancre, that 
they had made the voyage to Newfoundland in this manner, and 
that there they perched on the mast of a vessel, because, it hav- 
ing been blessed, they dared not enter it ; and that thence they 
threw powders to poison the fish Avhich the poor mariners had 
spread on the beach to dry. Another witch, Marie d'Aspil- 



THE WITCHES OF LABOURD. 201 

couette, who lived at Andaye, said that once, when at the sab- 
bath, she saw witches fly away in troops, and that on their re- 
turn two or three hours after they boasted of their feats at New- 
foundland, whither they had been conducted by the devil in the 
form of a youth of fifteen years of age. From numerous con- 
fessions, it appears that the favorite excursion of the witches of 
Labourd was to Newfoundland. 

The people of Labourd were generally witches from their 
childhood, having been introduced at a tender age by their moth- 
er, or some other woman, who undertook to act as their marruine, 
and who was sometimes rewarded with a handful of gold by the 
evil one on the presentation of a new subject. Others were in- 
troduced at a more advanced age, and this seems to have been 
specially the case with the men. A native of the town of Ne- 
rac, named Isaac de Queyran, who was twenty-five years of age. 
when he was put on his trial, stated that when he was a boy be- 
tween ten and twelve years of age, being then in the service of 
an honest man near the town of La Bastide d'Armaignac, he went 
to procure a light from an old woman who lived near the house 
of his master. As he was taking a light from her fire, the old 
woman warned him not to stir two pots which were on it, or he 
would suffer for his carelessness ; for, she said, they contained 
poisons which the " grand master'' had ordered her to make. 
Seeing that he took an interest in what she said, she asked him 
if he would go to the sabbath with her, " where he would see 
fine things." The boy's curiosity was excited, and he returned 
to her in the evening, when, it being nearly dark, and his scru- 
ples overcome, she anointed one of his wrists with a grease of 
which he could not remember the nature or color, and he was 
immediately carried through the air, at no great elevation, to the 
spot where the sabbath was held, which was about a league from 
La Bastide. There he saw a number of men and Avomen dan- 
cing and screaming, with which he was so much alarmed, that 
he ran away home. Next day, as he was going alone to his 
master's farm, he met on the road a man of large stature, and 
very dark, who told him that a woman assured him he (the boy) 
had promised to go to the sabbath, and asked him why he did not 
go. Isaac, in reply, asked what business it was of his to go there, 
on which the dark man said, " Stay, stay, and I will give thee 
something which will make thee come !" and at the same time he 
beat him with a stick over the shoulder that he felt the pain three 
days after. Subsequent to this, one day as he was passing over 
the bridge of the river near La Bastide, he again met the dark man, 



202 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

who asked him if he remembered the beating he had given him, 
and if he would not come with him, for which purpose he appointed 
to meet him the same evening behind the mill near the bridge. 
Isaac went to the place appointed, and there he saw the dark 
man come with a great number of people, and he asked him if 
he was ready to go with them. Isaac asked where they wanted 
to take him; upon which the dark man took him upon his shoul- 
ders to throw him into the mill-dam and drown him, " which he 
would have done, but he cried out so loud, that the people came 
out of the mill, on which the dark man and his followers disap- 
peared." Two days after, Isaac was keeping watch in his mas- 
ter's vineyard at night, when the dark man suddenly appeared, 
and this time he took hold of him and carried him through the 
air over the sands to a lande near St. Justin, a distance of about 
a quarter of a league. There he found more than fifty persons 
dancing to the sound of a tabor on which a little black devil was 
playing, who resembled a man only in his face, which was grim 
and frightful to behold. Others were eating and drinking at a 
table, at the head of which the dark man took his seat. They 
danced in a circle, holding hands, and their backs turned inward. 
Thus they amused themselves till the cock crowed, and then the 
" grand master" told them to go ; and most of them were carried 
home through the air; but Isaac, living near, returned on foot. 

Such were the stories which suggested the fancies of a Callot. 
Isaac de Queyran, having once commenced, went frequently to 
the sabbath, and continued his intercourse with the dark man till 
the time of De Lancre's terrible mission. 

The confessions of the witches of Labourd related chiefly to 
their sabbath, at which they assembled very frequently. The 
ordinary meetings were held everj^ Wednesday and Friday night. 
But besides these and a number of occasional meetings, they had 
general assemblies on a much more extensive scale, which were 
usually held at the four grand annual festivals of the church. 
The scenes enacted at these meetings resembled in their gene- 
ral features the ordinary descriptions of the sabbath in other 
parts, but they are described with more minuteness.^ The demon 
who presided over these meetings appeared not^always in the 
same form. According to one confession, when the witches ar- 
rived, they found a jug in the middle of the place of meeting, out 
of which Satan rose in the form of a goat, which became imme- 
diately of a monstrous size, and then before they separated, he 
became small and shrunk again into his old receptacle. Others 
gaid they had seen him like a great trunk of a tree, with an ob- 



DESCRIPTION OF THE DEMON. 203 

scure visage, but without arms or feet, seated on a throne. Some- 
times he appeared in the shape of a large black man, with horns, 
and his shape more or less definite. Some said he had two 
faces, one in the right place, and the other in the part more prop- 
erly intended for sitting than seeing. According to others, the 
second face was at the back of his head. Sometimes he ap- 
peared as a dog, or as an ox. He is represented as sitting on a 
throne, more or less richly ornamented, and sometimes of gold. 
The ceremonies of worship, the feasting, the dance, and the license 
which followed, are described in all their particulars, in a multi- 
tude of confessions extorted by the two commissioners. Accord- 
ing to these confessions, the children were kept apart, and were 
not admitted to see what was going on among their elders until 
they had reached a certain age. 

■Jeannette d'Abadie, of Siboro, whose confession has been al- 
• ready spoken of, described the demon as a hideous dark man 
with six horns on his head, and two faces. She saw there an 
infinite number of persons, many of whom she knew. She said 
that a man named Anduitze was employed at Siboro to give no- 
tice of the meetings to the sorcerers of that place ; and that a 
little blind musician of Siboro served as their minstrel, playing 
on the tabor and flute. She saw sometimes little demons with- 
out arms amuse themselves at the sabbaths with lighting a great 
fire and throwing witches into it, and afterward drawing them 
out unhurt. This was by way of hardening them against the 
punishment which eventually awaited their crimes. This per- 
son also described the great demon who presided as burning 
himself to powder to be distributed among them for the purpose 
of doing mischief in the world. She had seen witches change 
themselves into wolves., dogs, cats, and other animals, by wash- 
ing their hands in a certain water which they kept in a pot, and 
regain their natural form at pleasure. She said they were un- 
conscious that their acts were sinful ; that they went to church 
as well as to the sabbaths ; and that many of the priests who 
officiated at the former accompanied them also to the latter, and 
shared in all their excesses. She had seen the whole assembly 
at the close of the sabbath proceed to the cemetery of St. Jean 
de Luz or of Siboro, to baptize toads, which were clothed in red 
or black velvet, with a bell at the neck, and another to their 
feet ; and she had seen the dame of Martibelsarena dance at the 
sabbath with four toads, one dressed in black velvet with bells 
at its feet, and the other three unclothed ; the one in clothes was 
on her left shoulder, another sat on her right shoulder, and the 
other two perched like birds on her wrists ! 



204 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Another girl, twenty-four years of age, gave an extraordinary 
description of the grand sabbath. She compared it to a great 
fair, in which some were walliing about in their own shapes, 
while others were transformed into dogs, cats, asses, horses, pigs, 
and other animals. There were three grades of assistants at 
this ceremony : the children, who were kept at a distance from 
the rest, with white twigs in their hands, tending on troops of 
toads that were at pasture by the side of a stream ; those who 
were more advanced in age, but were as yet kept in a kind of 
noviciate, and were allowed to see everything, but not to partake; 
and lastly, those vAio were allowed unrestrained indulgence in 
all the amusements of the meeting. Of the latter some appeared 
in veils, to make the poorer sort think they were princes and 
great people, who were ashamed to show their faces. She 
pointed out one Esteben Detzail, then in prison on the same 
charge, as the man who usually held the basin of anything but 
holy water with which the initiated were sprinkled. She said 
that there were continually departures and new arrivals, and 
you might see them " fly, one into the air, another toward 
heaven, another toward earth, and another sometimes toward 
great fires that were lit here and there, like so many rockets 
sent into the air, or stars falling to the earth." 

Many of these witches gave extraordinary accounts of the 
manner in which they mixed their poisons and charms. The 
former were preserved in pots which they buried underground, 
or concealed in some very unfrequented place. Some of the ac- 
cused, when under examination, stated that one of their chief 
hiding-places was on a precipitous cliff" upon the coast near the 
Spanish border. Next day, which was the 19th of July, 1609, 
the two commissioners, with a multitude of people on horse and 
foot, sallied forth to the place indicated, but their efforts to reach 
the summit of the rock were fruitless, and the only result of this 
demonstration was to alarm the inhabitants of Fontarabia. Next 
day they returned, and were more successful in climbing, but 
they found that the witches had carried their treasure away. 

Though several witches in Labourd used a certain ointment 
preparatory to their voyage to the sabbath, yet this application 
appears not to have been absolutely necessary, as they often 
transported themselves thither without it. This was proved by 
the fact, that some of them, who were so addicted to these prac- 
tices that they were tempted to persevere in them even after 
they had fallen into the hands of their persecutors, went to the 
sabbaths from their prisons, where they could obtain no unguent. 



. THE PRIESTS IN DANGER. 205 

Several witnesses deposed to having met a woman named Ne- 
cato at a sabbath on the coast in the direction of Fontarabia, at 
the time that she was known to be in prison. On another oc- 
casion, six children declared that they had been taken to a sab- 
bath on the summit of the mountain La Rhune .by a witch of 
Urrogne, named Marissans de Tartas, who was on that very 
night confined in prison. La Rhune is a lofty mountain, its 
base stretching into three kingdoms, France, Navarre, and Spain, 
and its summit seems to have been a very favorite resort of the 
witches of these parts. Marie de la Parque, a girl of Andaye, 
of the age of nineteen or twenty, and several others, deposed 
that they were present at a sabbath held on the top of this moun- 
tain, when a woman named Domingina Maletena, made a v/ager 
with another which could leap farthest, and that Domingina went 
at one leap from the top of the mountain to the sands between 
Andaye and Fontarabia, a distance of nearly two leagues, while 
her rival dropped in the town of Andaye, before the door of one 
of the inhabitants. The other witches flew in a crowd after 
them to adjudge the victory. 

The witches of Labourd were known not only by marks on 
the body, but they had generally a diminutive mark in the left 
eye, described as resembling a frog's foot. Our two commis- 
sioners had with them a surgeon from Bayonne, who, from his 
extensive practice in examining witches, had attained to a won- 
derful skill in discovering their marks, and a girl of seventeen, 
who had an instinctive knowledge of them ; they employed the 
surgeon to examine the old women, while the girl was employed 
upon the younger members of the sex. Their marks were dis- 
covered by pinching and pricking them with a pin. 

We might fill a volume with the strange stories told by these 
Basque witches. Their alarm at the arrival of De Lancre and 
his companion was not without reason, for within a short time 
the arrests were so numerous, that it was hardly possible to pro- 
vide prisons to hold them. Some of the prisoners confessed 
that the devil himself was terrified, and they said that he had 
made several attempts to kill or bewitch the two commissioners, 
but that he had found himself powerless against their persons. 

From judging the lower orders, De Lancre and his companion 
proceeded to the better class, and especially to the priests, of 
whose character in Labourd he gives us a very low estimate. 
The first they arrested was an old man, a priest of Bayonne, 
who confessed, and was condemned to death. The execution 
of this man caused a great sensation at Bayonne and throughout 

18 



206 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

the whole country of Labourd. Other priests were accused and 
placed under arrest, and the alarm was so great, that many of the 
clergy fled the country, and others pretended vows to NOtre Dame 
of Montserrat, as a pretext for absenting themselves. The eager- 
ness of the clergy (o leave was construed into an evidence, or 
at least a ground for suspicion, of their guilt. The commission- 
ers arrested seven of the most notable in the whole country, who 
had charge of souls in the best parishes of Labourd, and of these 
two especially were notoriously criminal, Migalena, a priest of 
Siboro, aged nearly seventy years, and Master Pierre Bocal. of 
the same place, aged twenty-seven. These were both accused 
of burlesquing the ceremonies of the church in the devil's sab- 
baths, in addition to all the criminal and scoffing acts laid to the 
charge of the other witches. There were twenty-four witnesses 
who declared they had seen Migalena at the sabbaths, and sev- 
enteen who brought a similar charge against the other, so that 
they were both convicted and executed, but they made no con- 
fession. The other five priests, aware that the date of the com- 
mission of their two judges was near its expiration, made an 
appeal to the bishop of Bayonne, although they knew he had 
consented to the execution of the two others. The commission 
expired on the first November, and the commissioners left the 
five priests unjudged, and they perhaps escaped, to the great re- 
gret of their persecutors. 

De Lancre, after filling the country of Labourd with death and 
consternation, returned to Toulouse. He took so much interest 
in the subject of sorcery, that he soon after published another 
large quarto volume on the same subject, in 1622, under the title 
of" L'incredulite et mescreance du sortilege pleinement convain- 
cue." His fellow-inquisitor, D'Espaignet, contented himself 
with writing a Latin poem on the witches of Labourd, which he 
printed at the commencement of De Lancre's work, and in 
which he boasts of the havoc they had made among the follow- 
ers of Satan. 

Nuper relicto Cantabvum sinu, datis 

Partiin fugs, purtim rogn, 
Sagis, refixoque oslio Proserpinaa 

Regiii, ipsius peruliura 
Postquam auximus, tiirbffi ut Chatoutis cymbula 

Impar scelestfe vix natet, 
Fatalis uriise dura movenius calciilos, 

Nigrumque Theta prffivalet. 
Gaudebam ab hac iirorsns rederaptum me cruce, 

Sat jam ri-tectis dasniohura 
Versutiis : larvas, stryges decusseram, 

Dolci paratusotio. 



MAGIC IN SPAIN. 20f 

CHAPTER XVII. 

MAGIC IN SPAI]\" ; THE AUTO-DA-FE OF LOGRONO. 

We may probably explain the notorious character of the in- 
habitants of Labourd at this time by supposing that the popula- 
tion of the Basque provinces had retained, like the Welch in 
England, a large portion of the early superstitions of their race, 
and that these had so much influence on their minds, that under 
a sudden excitement the whole mass of the people were led to 
believe themselves witches. This view of the question is 
strengthened by the fact, that the Basque provinces on the other 
side of the border were proverbial throughout the southern pen- 
insula as the principal haunt of the witches of Spain. Messire 
Pierre de Lancre complains of the number of sorcerers who fled 
from French justice to seek refuge in Spain ; but they found 
Spanish justice equally relentless, for the inquisitors of the south 
came upon them, and seized upon all alike. Frenchmen or Span- 
iards, until they had taken so many prisoners that they were (to 
use De Lancre's own ^h.rn,se), fort empechez, to know how to deal 
with them all. 

Spain was always looked upon as in some sort the special 
country of superstition ; in the belief of the middle ages it was 
the cradle of sorcery and magic. The inquisition was taking 
root in the different provinces of the Spanish peninsula during 
the middle of the fifteenth century, and it found there a rich har- 
vest among the superstitions of the Christians, and the unbelief 
of the Moors and Jews. Alfonso de Spina, a Franciscan of Cas- 
tile, where the inquisition was pot then establisrhed, wrote, about 
the year 1458 or 1460, a work especially directed against here- 
tics and unbelievers, in which he gives a chapter on those arti- 
cles of popular belief which were derived from the ancient hea- 
thendom of the people. Among these, witches, under the name 
of xurguine (jurgina) or hruocf;, held a prominent place. But the 
Spanish friar of the fifteenth century, with much more good sense 
than was shown in later and more enlightened ages, taught that 
the acts attributed to this class of offenders, such as their power 
of transporting themselves through the air to distant localities in 
an incredibly short space of time, their entering houses, and the 
various criminal acts, which were the object and result of their 
transit, their power of transforming themselves, &c., existed on- 



203 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

ly in the imagination. He believed, however, that the people 
who bore the character of witches were deluded wretches, whose 
minds being prepared for his service, the devil made use of them 
as instruments of evil. He tells us that in his time these offend- 
ers abounded in Dauphiny and Gascony, where they assembled 
in great numbers by night on a wild table-land, carrying candles 
with them to worship Satan, who appeared in the form of a boar 
on a certain rock, popularly known by the name Elboch de Bi- 
terne, and that many of them had been taken by the inquisition 
of Toulouse and burnt. From that time we find, in Spanish his- 
tory, the charge of witchcraft and sorcery not unfrequently 
brought forward under different forms and circumstances, of which 
several remarkable examples are given by Llorente in his histo- 
ry of the inquisition in Spain. 

The first auto-da-fe against sorcery appears to have been that 
of Calahorra, in 1507, when thirty women, charged before the 
inquisition as witches, were burnt. In 1527, a great number 
of women were accused in Navarre of the practice of sorcery, 
through the information of two girls, one of eleven, the other 
only of nine years old, who confessed before the royal coun- 
cil of Navarre that they been received into the sect of the jnr- 
ginas, and promised, on condition of being pardoned, to dis- 
cover all the women who were implicated in these practices. 
The two children declared that by inspecting the left eye of the 
person accused, they knew instantly if she were a witch or not ; 
and having pointed out a district where they were numerous, and 
where they held their assemblies, the council sent a commission- 
er thither with them, attended by an escort of fifty horsemen. 
At each village or hamlet they came to, they confined the two girls 
separately in two houses, and brought all persons suspected of 
witchcraft in that neighborhood .before them both in succession. 
All those women who happened to be declared to be witches by 
both giris, were adjudged to be guilty, and were thrown into pris- 
on, where they were soon forced to make confessions. They 
declared that their society consisted of a hundred and fifty 
women ; that on the reception of a new proselyte, if she were 
of a marriageable age, a young man, well made and robust, was 
given to her as a companion ; that she was made to deny her 
Christianity ; and that when this ceremony took place, a black 
goat appeared suddenly in the middle of a circle, and walked 
round it several times ; that as soon as they heard the hoarse 
voice of this animal, they all began to dance, to a noise which 
resembled that of a trumpet ; that they next kissed the goat in 



THE WITCHES FOUND GUILTY. 209 

tlie same manner as has been described in other relations ; and 
then they feasted on bread, wine, and cheese ; after this was 
done, their male companions v/ere changed into goats, and bore 
them through the air to the place where they were to work mis- 
chief; they said they had poisoned several persons by the order 
of Satan, and that for this purpose he introduced them into their 
houses through the windows or doors. They had general assem- 
blies the night before Easter, and on the grand festivals of the 
church, at which they indulged in all the excesses of the witch- 
es' sabbath. We are assured by the historian who has recorded 
these events (Don Prudencio de Sandoval) that the commission- 
er took one of the witches and offered her pardon if she would 
perform before him the operation of sorcery, so as to fly away in 
his sight. To this proposal she agreed, and having obtained pos- 
session of the box of ointment which was found upon her when 
arrested, she went up into a tower with the commissioner, and 
placed herself in front of a window. A number of other per- 
sons, we are assured, were present. She began by anointing 
Avith her unguent the pahxi of her left hand, her wrist and elbow, 
and by rubbing it under her arm, and on the groin and left side. 
She then said with a loud voice, " Art thou there ?" All the 
spectators heard a voice in the air replying, " Yes, I am here." 
The woman then began to descend the wall of the tower with 
her head downward, crawling on her hands and feet like a lizard ; 
and when she was half way down, she took a start into the air, 
and flew away in view of all the spectators, who followed her 
with their eyes till she was no longer visible. The commission- 
er offered a reward to anybody who would bring her back, and 
two days afterward she was brought in by some shepherds who 
had found her in the fiePds. When asked by the commissioner 
why she did not fly away far enough to be out of the reach of 
her pursuers, she said that " her master" would not carry her 
further than three leagues, at which distance he left her in the 
fields where the shepherds found her. The witches arrested on 
this occasion, after being found guilty by the secular judges, were 
handed over to the inquisition of Estella, and there condemned 
to be whipped and imprisoned. 

The moment the attention of the inquisition was thus drawn 
to the crime of sorcery, the prevalence of this superstition in the 
Basque provinces became notorious ; and Charles V., rightly 
judging that it was to be attributed more to the ignorance, of the 
population of those districts than to any other cause, directed 
that preachers should be sent to instruct them. 

18* 



210 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

The first treatise in the Spanish language on the subject of 
sorcery, by a Franciscan monk named Martin de Castailaga, was 
printed under approbation of the bishop of Calahorra in 1529. 
About this time the zeal of the inquisitorsof Saragossa was ex- 
cited by the appearance of many witches who were said to come 
from NavaMie, and to have been sent by their sect as missionsi- 
ries to make disciples of the women of Aragon. This sudden 
witch persecution in Spain appears to have had an influence on 
the fate of the witches in Italy. Pope Adrian IV., who was 
raised to the papal chair in 1522, was a Spanish bishop, and had 
held the office of inquisitor-general in Spain. In the time of 
Julius II., who ruled the papal world from 1503 to 1513, a sect 
of witches and sorcerers had been discovered in Lombardy, who 
were extremely numerous, and had their sabbaths and all the 
other abominations of the continental witches. The proceed- 
ings against them appear to have been hindered by a dispute be- 
tween the inquisitors and the secular and ecclesiastical judges 
who claimed the jurisdiction in such cases. On the 20th of 
July, 1523, Pope Adrian issued a bull against the crime of sor- 
cery, placing it in the sole jurisdiction of the inquisitors. This 
bull perhaps gave the new impulse to the prosecution of the 
witches in Spain 

Of the cases which followed during more than a century, the 
most remarkable was that of the auto-da-fe at Logroiio on the 7th 
and 8th of November, 1610, which arose in some measure from 
the visitation of the French Basque province in the preceding 
year. The valley of Bastan is situated in Navarre at the foot of 
the Pyrenees, on the French frontier, and at no great distance 
from Labourd. It was within the jurisdiction of the inquisition 
established at Logroho in Castile. The* mass of the population 
of this valley appear to have been sorcerers, and they held their 
meetings or sabbaths at a place called Zugarramurdi. Their 
practices were brought to light in the following manner. A little 
girl from the neighboring French territory was sent to board with 
a woman of Zugarramurdi, who was one of the witches, and was 
in the habit of taking the child with her to their assemblies — she 
was as yet too young to be formally initiated. After her return 
home, the child, having reached a proper age, became a witch 
at the instigation of one of her countrywomen, but she subse- 
quently repented, and obtained absolution from the bishop of 
Bayonne. She afterward went again to reside at Zugarramurdi, 
where meeting one day a woman of the place named Maria de 
Jurreteguia, she told her that she knew she'was a witch. When 



THE WITCHES OF BASTAN. 211 

tlie husband of Maria heard this, he loaded her v/ith reproaches, 
and having been confronted with the accused, she was obliged 
to confess her fault. Maria was immediately carried before the 
inquisition of Logroiio, and she was given to expect her pardon 
in return for a full confession of the practice of her associates. 

Maria de Jurreteguia was the wife of Estevan de Navalcorrea. 
Terrified at the accusation of the French girl, and the anger of 
her husband, she made a full confession to the inquisitors of 
Logroho, in which she gave a detailed account of the pro- 
ceedings of the " sect" of sorcerers, which was afterward con- 
firmed by the confessions of eighteen of her accomplices, who 
were arrested in consequence of the information she gave. She 
had been a witch from her infancy, having been introduced to 
the witches' meetings by her maternal aunts Maria and Juana 
Chipia. She had recently left her evil ways, and made a con- 
fession to and received absolution from the cure of Zugarra- 
murdi, in consequence of which she had been persecuted by the 
devil and the other witches. She said that when her aunts took 
her to the sabbath meetings they passed out of the house through 
liitle holes in the doors, the latter being locked. Among her 
practices, she said that she had often deceived a priest who was 
fond of hunting, by taking the form of a hare, and leading him a 
long course. Miguel de Goiburu was king of the sorcerers of 
Zugarramurdi ; he said that he was once at a meeting af the sor- 
cerers in a spot on the French side of the frontier, at which 
more than five hundred persons were present, on which one of 
his party, Estefania de Tellechea, exclaimed in astonishment, 
" Jesus, what a crowd !" and the whole scene disappeared, and 
the assembly separated in the utmost consternation. On another 
occasion, a witch named Maria Escain having persuadad a sail- 
or to join their society, at the first meeting which he attended, 
he was so astonished at the horrible figure of the devil, that he 
cried out involuntarily, " Jesus, how ugly he is!" on which the 
meeting broke up in the same manner. His brother, Joanes de 
Goiburu, confessed that he had played on the tabor when the 
witches danced at the meetings ; and that one day, having acci- 
dentally prolonged their meeting till after cock-crow, his imp 
disappeared, and he was obliged to return to Zugarramurdi on 
foot. The wife of this man, Graciana de Barrenechea, was their 
queen. She told a story of her jealousy of another witch named 
Maria Joanes de Oria, because the latter was too great a favor- 
ite with the devil ; and after succeeding in seducing the evil one 
into an act of infidelitj^ she obtained his permission to poison her 



212 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

rival. Juan de Sansin, the cousin of Miguel de Goiburu, con- 
fessed that his office had been to play on the flute at the sab- 
baths. Martin de Vizcay was the overseer of the children who 
came to the assembly, and it was his business to keep them at a 
distance, where they could not see what took place between the 
demon and his victims. Two sisters, Estefania and Juana de 
Tellechea, confessed like the others that they had done much 
injury to the persons and properties of their neighbors who did 
not belong to their society. The latter said that one day, ac- 
cording to an ancient usage of the place, the inhabitants of Zu- 
garramurdi assembled in the evening of St. John's day to elect a 
king of the Christians and a king of the Moors, who were to 
command the two parties of Christians and Moors in the sham 
fight which took place several times in the year for their amuse- 
ment. It was in the year 1608, and her husband was elected 
king of the Moors. He was not a sorcerer, and as he received 
that night the visits of his neighbors to compliment him on his 
mock dignity, she was obliged to remain at home to do the hon- 
ors of the house, and was thus hindered from attending the 
witches' assembly. In spite of this reasonable excuse, Juana 
was condemned at the next sabbath to be severely whipped by 
Juan de Echalaz, a smith, who held the office of the devil's exe- 
cutioner. 

All the persons arrested on this occasion agreed in their de- 
scription of the sabbath, and of the practices of the witches, 
which in their general features bore a close resemblance to 
those of the witches of Labourd. The usual place of meeting 
was known here, as in Labourd, by the popular name of Aquc- 
larre, a Gascon word, signifying the meadow of the goat. Their 
ordinary meetings were held on the nights of Monday, Wednes- 
day, and Friday, every week, but they had grand feasts on the 
principal holydays of the church, such as Easter, Pentecost, 
Christmas, &c. All these feasts appear to have been fixed by 
the Christian teachers at the period of older pagan festivals. 
The form ordinarily assumed by the demon when a new convert 
was to be received, was that of a man with a sad and choleric 
countenance, very black and very ugly. He was seated on a 
lofty throne, black as ebony, and sometimes gilt, with all the ac- 
cessories calculated to inspire reverence. On his head was a 
crown of small horns, with two larger ones behind, and another 
larger one on the forehead ; it was the latter which gave a light 
somewhat greater than that of the moon, but less than that of the 
sun, which served to illuminate the assembly. His eyes were 



TIME OF THE SABBATH. 213 

large and round, and terrible to look at ; his beard like that of a 
goat, and the lower part of his body had the form of that ani- 
mal : his feet and hands were like those of a man, except that 
the ends of his fingers were curved like those of a bird of prey 
and ended in long pointed nails, and his toes were like those of 
a goose. His voice bore some resemblance to the braying of 
an ass, his words being ill articulated, and in a low .and iiTegu- 
lar tone. 

Such was the demon of the Basque superstitions. His wor- 
ship was conducted with the same forms and ceremonies as in 
Labourd. The hour of meeting was nine o'clock in the evening, 
and the assembly generally broke up at twelve. After the wor- 
ship of the demon, followed a travestie of the Christian mass, at 
which the king and queen of the sorcerers officiated as priests. 
After the mass was finished, came the usual scene of licentious- 
ness. Many. of their ceremonies were accompanied 'with popu- 
lar rhymes in Spanish. Thus when the witches and sorcerers 
were married together after the devil's mass, the devil said to 
them : — 

" Esta es bueua parati, 
Este parati lo toma." 

And as new sorcerers arrived at the sabbaths, the assembly 
chanted joyfully the couplet : — 

" Alegremonos alegremos, 
Que geiite uueva teneraos." 

After the scene last alluded to, the tables were spread, and we 
are told that they were always covered with dirty table-cloths. 
Their favorite viands were the flesh of men, women or children, 
recently dead, whom they had dug up from their graves, and it 
was generally the nearest relatives ol the deceased who assisted 
in preparing them for the feast. Little demons served at table. 
After the feast, they all danced together in the wildest confusion. 
At one of their sabbaths there was a dancing-girl, who, to the 
sound of castanets (c.astanuelas), made such extraordinary capers, 
that all the witches were in admiration, and one of them ex- 
claimed, " Jesus, how she leaps !" on which the whole scene 
disappeared, and the person who had uttered the imprudent ex- 
clamation was left alone to find her way home how she could. 
At the next meeting she was severely beaten for her offence. 

Each new witch had a toad given to her, which was her imp, 
and always accompanied her to her meetings. From this ani- 
mal she extracted her most deadly poison. Befoi'e they left the 



214 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

sabbath, the demon preached to them on the duties they had con- 
tracted toward him, exhorted Ji^m to go and injure their fellow- 
creatures, and to practise every kind of wickedness, and gave 
them powders and liquors for poisoning and destroying. He 
often accompanied them himself when some great evil was to be 
done, and to carry their purposes into effect they changed them- 
selves into the forms of vermin, or of animals, or birds of prey. 
In these expeditions, when they took place by night, the demon 
carried the arm of an unbaptized infant, lit at the ends of the fin- 
gers which served the place of a candle or torch. When they 
entered people's houses they threw a powder on the faces of 
the inmates, who were thrown thereby into so deep a slumber 
that nothing could wake them, until the witches were gone. 
Sometimes the demon opened the mouths of the people in their 
beds, and the sorcerer placed something on the tongue which 
produced this sleep. The charm was then accompanied with 
the words — 

'' De las movtiferas aguas 
Dos trnEjds dizen te appllco, 
Con quien Ins polvos de sagas 
Y mueras rabiaiido tisico." 

Sometimes they threw these powders on the fruits of the field, 
and produced hail which destroyed them. On these occasions, 
the demon accompanied them in the form of a husbandman, and 
when they threw the powders they said,* 

" Polvos. polvos, 
Piei'da se tado, 
Quedeu los nuesti-os, 
Y abrasense otros." 

When they were not inclined to do any of these destructive 
injuries, they amused themselves with creating phantoms which 
they threw in the way of travellers to frighten them. 

Sometimes the witches and sorcerers went from their sabbath 
to attend a larger meeting, which was held at Pampeluna, where 
they went to worship a great demon, named Barrabam, who was 
higher in dignity than the other devils, and his ceremonies were 
attended with greater pomp. They called him " the grand mas- 
ter." Then they went all in a body and passed over the frontier 
into France, Avhere they met other troops of sorcerers, and they 
were then so numerous that one of the deponents said that when 
the assembly broke np, the sky was completely clouded with 
the troops of witches flying away in all directions. 

* Ttiese rhymes are taken from the report of this ti'ansaclion given in De Lan- 
cre ; they bear a singular i-esemblaace in general chai'acter to those of the Scottish 
witches that will be given in a subsequent chapter. 



OPINIONS OF THE SPANISH DOCTORS. 215 

The toad acted a very important part in the witchcraft of the- 
Basque provinces. When the nevi^ witch was presented to the 
meeting for the first time, the toad was given into the care of her 
marraine, until the convert had completed her noviciate, and was 
considered fit to receive it into her own keeping. It was dressed 
in a little sack, with a capuchin or cowl, through which the head 
passed, and open imder the belly, where it was tied with a band, 
which 'served as a girdle ; this vest was generally made of green 
or black cloth, or velvet. It was to be taken great care of, and 
to be often fed and caressed. It was one of its duties to keep 
,its mistress or master in mind of the time for attending the sab- 
bath, and to wake him at the necessary time if he should be 
asleep. The toad also furnished the liquor with which the 
witches rubbed different parts of their bodies when they were 
preparing to go to their assemblies, and by which they were 
enabled to fly through the air, carrying the reptile with them. 
Sometimes the sorcerer travelled tiither on foot, and then the 
toad preceded, taking large leaps, and they passed over immense 
distances in a few minutes, as when they fled through the air. 
If the meeting were accidentally prolonged till after cock-crow, 
ihe toad disappeared ; and the sorcerer found himself reduced to 
his natural powers ; but the animal itself soon reappeared in the 
place where it was usually kept. 

The witches among themselves enjoyed different degrees of 
rank and estimation, according to their intimacy with the evil 
one, and their zeal and aptitude to work mischief. It was to 
those only whom he held in the highest esteem, that Satan im- 
parted the more deadly poisons, and he often assisted in person 
at their composition. 

The auto-da-fe of Logroiio, as far as it related to the sect of 
the sorcerers of Zugarramurdi, caused a great sensation, and 
brouoht the subject of witchcraft under the consideration of the 
Spanish theologians. These were so far more enlightened than 
the body of their contemporaries in other countries, that they 
generally leaned to the opinion that witchcraft was a mere de- 
lusion, and that the details of the confessions of the miserable 
creatures who were its victims were all creations of the imagi- 
nation. They were punished because their belief was a heresy, 
contrary to the doctrines of the church. Llorente gives the ab- 
stract of a treatise on this subject by a Spanish ecclesiastic 
named Pedro de Valentia, addressed to the grand inquisitor in 
consequence of the trial at Logrono in 1610, and which remained 
in manuscript among the archives of the inquisition. This writer 



216 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

adopts entirely the opinion that the acts confessed by the witches 
were imaginary ; he attributes them partly to the method in 
which the examinations were carried on, and to the desire of the 
ignorant people examined to escape by saying what seemed to 
please their persecutors, and partly to the effects of the ointments 
and draughts which they had been taught to use, and which were 
composed of ingredients that produced sleep, and acted upon the 
imagination and the mental faculties.* 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

ADVENTURES OF DOCTOR TORRALVA. 

Spain had not in the sixteenth century ceased to be celebrated 
for its magicians, as we learn from a variety of allusions in wri- 
ters of that and the subsequent periods. We have seen that it 
was then the country from which magical rings were procured, 
and that it was equally with other lands the scene of treasure- 
hunting and of witchcraft. Nor was it wanting in great magi- 
cians. One of these gave considerable celebrity to the village 
of Bargota, near Tiana, in the diocese of Calah'orra. The cure of 
Bargota, who is well known to every reader of the glorious ro- 
mance of Cervantes, astonished the territories of Rioja and Na- 
varre by his extraordinary feats. Among other exploits he was 
in the habit of transporting himself to distant countries, and re- 
turning in an incredibly short space of time. In this way he 
witnessed most of the remarka,ble occurrences of the wars in 
Italy at the commencement of the sixteenth century, in which 
Spain had a special interest, and he announced his intelligence 
the same day at Viana and Logroiio. He was forewarned of 
each event by the demon, his familiar. • The latter told him one 
day that the pope would that night die a violent death. It ap- 
pears that his holiness had an intrigue with a lady whose hus- 
band held a high office in the papal court. The latter was 
afraid to complain openly, but he was none the less eager for 
revenge, and he joined with some desperate ruffians in a plot to 
take away the pope's life. The demon was of course rejoiced 
at the prospect of evil, but his friend the cure determined to 

* On this subject the reader is referred to Salverte's Philosophy of Magic, by 
W. Thomson, vol ii., chapters 1 and 2. 8vo. Bentley, 1846. 



DOCTOR TORRALVA. 217 

cheat him and save the head of the church from the danger 
which threatened him. He pretended to be seized with an 
eager desire to proceed to Rome, that he might hear the rumors 
to which such a remarkable occurrence must give rise, and to 
witness the pope's funeral. The desire was no sooner expressed 
than it was gratified. On his arrival at the eternal city, the cure 
hastened to the papal palace, forced his way into the presence 
of the sovereign pontiff, and told him the whole particulars of 
the plot against his life, and thus defeated the designs of the con- 
spirators. After having thus outwitted him, the cure wished to 
have no further intercourse with Satan ; he made a voluntary 
confession to the pope, and in return for the signal service he 
had performed, his holiness gave him a full absolution. On his 
return, he was delivered, as a matter of form, into the custody 
of the inquisitors of Logrono, but he was acquitted, and restored 
to his liberty. 

There lived at the same time a magician who gained far 
greater celebrity than the cure of Bargota, and who adopted the 
same extraordinary mode of travelling. This was Doctor Eu- 
genie Torralva, a physician in the family of the admiral of Cas- 
tile.* Torralva was born at Cuenca, but at the age of fifteen he 
was sent to Rome, where he became attached to the bishop of 
Volterra, Francesco Soderini, in the quality of a page. He now 
pursued with great earnestness the study of philosophy and med- 
icine, under Don Cipion and the masters Mariana, Avanselo, 
and Maguera, until he obtained the degree of doctor in medicine. 
Under these teachers, Torralva learned to have doubts of the im- 
mortality of the soul and the divinity of Christ, and made great 
advances in skepticism. About the year 1501, when he was 
already a practitioner in medicine at Rome, he formed a very inti- 
m?te acquaintance with one Master Alfonso, a man who had first 
quitted the Jewish faith for Mohammedanism, from which he had 
been converted to Christianity, and he had then finally adopted 
natural religion or deism. This man's discourses overthrew the 
little faith that still remained in Torralva's mind, and he became 
a confirmed skeptic, although he appears to have concealed his 
opinions from the world, and perhaps he subsequently renounced 
them. 

* Torralva, un grande hombre, y nigromante. 
Medico, y familiar del admirante. 

Luis Cap ATA, Carlo Famoso, canto xxviii. 
Tbe autbority for the details of the history of this extraordinary personage is 
Llorente, ■who derived his information from the original papers relating to his trial, 
preserved in the archives of the inquisition. Part of the story is told rather differ- 
ently in the metrical history of Capata. 

19 



218 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Among Torralva's friends at Rome was a Dominican monk, 
called Brother Pietro, who told him one day that he had in his 
service " an angel of the order of good spirits," named Zeqiiiel, 
who was so powerful in the knowledge of the future and of hid- 
den things that he was without his equal in the spiritual world, 
and of such a peculiar temper that, while other spirits made bar- 
gains with their employers before they would give them their 
services, Zequiel was so disinterested that he despised all con- 
siderations of this kind, and served only in friendship those who 
placed their confidence in him and deserved his attachment. 
The least attempt at restraint. Brother Pietro said, would drive 
him away for ever. 

Torralva's curiosity was excited, and when Brother Pietro 
generously proposed to resign the familiar spirit to his friend, 
the offer was eagerly accepted. It appears that the person most 
concerned in this transaction made no objection to the change 
of masters, and at the summons of brother Pietro, Zequiel made 
his appearance, in the form of a fair young man, with light hair, 
and dressed in a flesh-colored habit and black surtout.' He ad- 
dressed himself to Torralva, and said, " I will be yours as long 
as you live, and will follow you wherever you are obliged to go." 
From this time Zequiel appeared to Torralva at every change 
of the moon, and as often as the physician wanted his services, 
which was generally for the pui-pose of transporting him in a 
short space of time to distant places. In those interviews, the 
spirit took sometimes the semblance of a traveller, and some- 
times that of a hermit. In his intercourse with Torralva, he said 
nothing contrary to Christianity, but accompanied him to church, 
and never counselled him to evil ; from which circumstances 
the physician concluded that his familiar was a good angel. He 
always conversed in the Latin or Italian language. 

Rome had now become to Torralva a second country ; but 
about the year 1502 he went to Spain, and subsequently he trav- 
elled through most parts of Italy, until he again fixed himself at 
Rome, under the protection of his old patron the bishop of Vol- 
terra, who had been made a cardinal on the 31st of May, 1503. 
With this introduction he soon obtained the favor of others of 
the cardinals, and rose to high repute for his skill in medicine. 
Having met at this time with some books on chiromancy, he 
became an eager student in that art, in the knowledge of which 
he subsequently surpassed most of his contemporaries. Tor- 
ralva owed his medical knowledge partly to his familiar, who 
taught him the secret virtues of many plants, with which other 



TORRALVx\ AND ZEQUIEL. 219 

physicians were not acquainted ; and when the practitioner took 
exorbitant fees, Zequiel rebuked him, telling him that, since he 
had received his knowledge for nothing, he ought to impart it 
gratuitously. And when on several occasions Torralva was in 
want of money, he found a supply in his chamber, which he be- 
lieved was furnished him by the good spirit, who, however, 
would never acknowledge that he was the secret benefactor who 
had relieved him from his embarrassment. 

Torralva returned to Spain in 1510, and lived for some time 
at the court of Ferdinand the catholic. One day Zequiel, whose 
informations were usually of a political character, told him that 
the king would soon receive disagreeable news. Torralva im- 
mediately communicated this piece of information to Ximenes 
de Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo (who was subsequently raised 
to the dignity of cardinal, and made inquisitor general of Spain), 
and the grand captain Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordova. The 
same day a courier arrived with despatches from Africa, con- 
taining intelligence of the ill success of the expedition against 
the Moors, and of the death of Don Garcia de Toledo, son of 
the Duke of Alva, who commanded it. 

Torralva seems to have made no secret of his intercourse 
with Zequiel. He had received his familiar from a monk, and 
the spirit is said to have shown himself to the cardinal of Vol- 
terra at the physician's wish ; the latter now did not hesitate to 
acquaint the archbishop of Toledo and the grand captain how 
he came by his early intelligence. The archbishop earnestly 
desired to be permitted to have the same privilege as the Italian 
cardinal, and Torralva wished to gratify him, but Zequiel re- 
fused, though he softened his refusal by telling him to inform the 
archbishop that he would one day be a king, a prophecy which 
was believed to be fulfilled when he was made absolute gov- 
ernor of Spain and the Indies. 

The physician was frequently favored with revelations of this 
kind. On one occasion, when Torralva was at Rome, Zequiel 
told him. that his friend, Pietro Margano, would lose his life if he 
went out of the city that day. He was not able to see him in 
order to warn him of his danger, and Pietro went out of Rome 
and was assassinated. Zequiel told him on ancfther occasion 
that the cardinal of Sienna would end his life in a tragical man- 
ner, which was verified in 1517, after the judgment of Pope Leo 
X., against him. Torralva re-established himself in Rome in 
1513, and soon after his arrival he had a great desire to see his 
intimate friend, Thomas de Becara, who was then at Venice ; 



200 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

upon which Zequiel took him thither and back in so short a space 
of time that his absence was not perceived by his friends at 
Rome. 

It was not long before he again returned to Spain, where, about 
the year 1516, the cardinal of Santa Cruz, Don Bernardino de Car- 
bajal, consulted him on a subject of some importance. A Spanish 
lady named Rosales had complained to Don Bernardino that her 
nights were disturbed by a phantom which appeared in the form 
of a murdered man. The cardinal had sent his physician. Dr. 
Morales, who watched at night with the lad}^, but saw no appa- 
rition, although she gave him notice of its appearance, and point- 
ed out the place where it stood. Don Bernardino hoped to know 
more of the matter by the means of Torralva, and he requested 
him to go with the physician Morales to pass the night in the 
lady's house. They went together and an hour after midnight 
they heard the lady's cry of alarm, and Avent into her room, 
where, as before, Morales saw nothing. But Torralva, who was 
better acquainted with the spiritual world, perceived a figure re- 
sembling a dead man, behind which appeared another apparition 
in the form of a woman. He asked with a firm voice, "What 
dost thou seek here ?" to which the apparition replied, " A treas- 
ure," and immediately disappeared. Torralva consulted Zequiel 
on this subject, and was informed that there was buried under the 
house a corpse of a man who had been stabbed to death with a 
poignard. 

Torralva v/as soon at Rome again, and among his more inti- 
mate friends, there was Don Diego de Zun'ga, a relative of the 
duke of Bejar, and brother to Don Antonio, grand prior of the 
order of St. John, in Castile. In 1519, the two friends returned 
to Spain together. On their way, at Barcelonetta near Turin, 
while they were walking and conversing with the secretary Aze- 
vedo (who had been adjutant-general of the Spanish armies in 
Italy and Savoy), Azevedo and Zuiiiga thought they saw some- 
thing indefinable pass by Torralva's side. He told them it was 
his angel Zequiel, who had approached him to whisper in his 
ear. Zuiiiga had a great desire to see Zequiel, but Torralva 
could not prevail with the latter to show himself. At Barcelona, 
Torralva saw in the house of the canon, Juan Garcia, a book of 
chiromancy, and in the margin of one of the leaves was written 
a magical process to enable a person to gain money at play. 
Zuiiiga^ who appears to have been a man of no very exalted mo- 
rality, wished to make himself master of this art, and Torralva 
copied the characters, and told his friend that he must write them 



TORRALVA'S VOYAGE TO ROME. 221 

with his own hand on paper, using for ink the blood of a bat, and 
that the writing must be performed on a Wednesday, because that 
day was dedicated to Mercury. This charm he was to wear on 
his person when at play. 

In 1520, Torralva went again to Rome. Being at Valladolid, 
he told Diego de Zuiiiga of his intentions, informing him that he 
had the means of travelling there with extraordinary rapidity, 
that he had but to place himself astride on a stick, and he was 
carried through the air, guided by a cloud of fire. On his arri- 
val at Rome, he saw the cardinal of Volterra and the grand prior 
of the order of St. John, who were very earnest with him that 
he should give them his familiar spirit. Torralva entreated Ze- 
quiel to comply with their wish, but in vain. In 1525, Zequiel 
recommended him to return to Spain, assuring him that he would 
obtain the place of physician to the infanta Eleanora, queen dow- 
ager of Portugal, and subsequently consort to Frangois I., of 
France. Torralva obeyed the suggestion of his monitor, and ob- 
tained the promised appointment. 

It was after his return to Spain, and before he obtained this 
appointment, tliat a circumstance occurred which added greatly 
to Torralva's celebrity. On the evening of the fifth of May, of 
the year last mentioned (1525), the physician received a visit 
from Zequiel, who told him that Rome would be taken next day 
by the troops of the emperor,* and Torralva desired to be taken 
to Rome to see this important event. They left Valladolid to- 

* Catapa, who gives an account of this voya?e according to the popular tradition, 
makes Torealva leave the admiral's town of Medina de Rioseco instead of Valla- 
dolid. He says that Torralva was sitting pensive and sad in his chamber contem- 
plating the sky, when Zequiel appeared to him, who is described thus : — 

" Zaqaeil ud familiar, qu'en la figura 
De un viejo sauo ant'el se aparescia, 
Con un bordon, y en cuerpo en vestidura 
Blanca que hasta el suelo le cubria ; 
Y con la barba blanca a la ciutura, 
Como assi tan pensoso estar le via, 
En la ceiTada piega en este instante 
Se aparescio Torralva nigromante." 

Carlo Famoso, cant. xxx. 

Zequiel asked him why he was pensive, to which he replied that he was puzzled 
with the stars. The familiar then informed him that the constable of Bourbon was 
before Rome, which would be taken next day. 

" Havra sangre y crueldad en abundancia, 
De que yo espero haver muy gi-and ganancia." 

Capata imagined that the familiar might be a demon, and that he would natural- 
ly delight in the hoiTors which attended the sack of Rome. 

19* ■ 



222 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

gether at eleven o'clock at night, on foot, as if to take a walk ; 
but at a short distance from the town Zequiel gave his compan- 
ion a stick full of knots, and said, " Shut your eyes^ and fear 
nothing ; take this in your hand, and no harm will happen to 
you." After a little time, at Zequiel's bidding, Torralva opened 
his eyes, and he found himself so near the sea that he could have 
touched the water with his hand ; and the black cloud which had 
previously enveloped him gave place immediately to so bright a 
light, that he was afraid of being burnt. Zequiel saw his alarm, 
and rebuked him for it in a familiar phrase, " No temas, bestia 
jieraV (fear nothing, stupid fellow). Torralva then shut his 
eyes again, and after a while felt himself on the solid ground, and 
heard his companion bid him open his eyes, and see if he knew 
where he was. He recognised the city of Rome spread out be- 
fore him, and knew that he was standing on the tower of Nona. 
The clock of the castle of St. Angelo was just striking the hour 
of midnight, so that they had been exactly one hour on their jour- 
ney. The city was shrouded in night, and they waited till day- 
break, when they passed through the different parts of the city, 
and witnessed the events of that terrible day, the attack of the 
besiegers, the death of the constable of Bourbon, the flight of 
the pope into the castle of St. Angelo, the terror and slaughter 
of the citizens, the pollution of the churches, and the wild riot 
of the conquerors. It took them an hour and a half to return to 
Valladolid, and when Zequiel left the doctor there, he said to 
him, " In future you will believe all I tell you." Torralva imme- 
diately made public all he had seen during this extraordinary ex- 
cursion, and when in due course of time news arrived of the cap- 
ture and sack of Rome, the court of Spain was filled with aston- 
ishment. 

Torralva's fame as a magician was now in everybody's movith, 
and it seems that men of high rank, in both church and state, 
had been cognizant of, if not accomplices in, his practices of for- 
bidden arts. It was at length by one of his intimate friends that 
he was denounced to the inquisitors, who would perhaps have 
taken no notice of him had they not been urged to the pursuit, 
Diego de Zuniga, the same who had been so long a confidant in 
his intercourse with the familiar, and who had even benefited by 
his arts to profit at the gambling-table, had suddenly become fa- 
natical and superstitious. Not satisfied with repentance for his 
own sins, Zuiiiga denounced Torralva to the inquisition of Ciien- 
qa, and when the doctor visited that city at the beginning of the 
year 1528, he was arrested and thrown into prison. He imrae- 



TORRALVA BEFORE THE INQUISITION. 223 

diately confessed all his dealings with Zequiel, whom he per- 
sisted in regarding as a good angel, and made no less than seven 
written declarations, the same in effect, but contradicting each 
other in some of the particulars. As these seem to have been 
thought not to be entirely satisfactory, Torralva was put to the 
torture, the result of which was that he declared himself con- 
vinced that Zequiel was a demon. He said that his familiar had 
warned him that a danger hung over him if he went to Cuenya 
at that time, but that he had disregarded the admonition. 

The inquisitors now changed their severity to indulgence, and 
on the 6th of March, 1529, they suspended Torralva's process for 
a year. But before the expiration of that period, a new accuser 
presented himself, and deposed to his disputes at Rome, in his 
younger days on the immortality of the soul and the divinity of 
Jesus Christ. This placed the question in a new light, and Tor- 
ralva underwent examination again on the 29th of January, 1530, 
when he made a new declaration on the subject of his early ed- 
ucation and opinions. The case now assumed a still more se- 
rious character, and the inquisitors of Cuen9a having communi- 
cated with the supreme council of the inquisition in Spain, re- 
ceived directions to appoint some pious and learned persons to 
labor for the conversion of the accused, and to persuade him to 
renounce, sincerely and absolutely, the science of chiromancy, 
his intercourse with Zequiel, and all treaties he might have en- 
tered into with the evil one, for the unburdening of his con- 
science and the salvation of his soul. The inquisitors intrusted 
this task to Brother Augustino Barragan, prior of the convent 
of Dominicans at Cuenca, and Diego Manriques, a canon of the 
cathedral, and these men labored with so much zeal and effect, 
that Torralva agreed to do everything they wished, except that 
he would not undertake to see Zequiel no more. For it appears 
that the familiar remained so far faithful to his original promise, 
that he continued to visit Torralva in the prison of the inquisi- 
tion, and the doctor represented to his converters that he was 
obliged to see him whether he would or not. The inquisitors 
themselves were so credulous, that they requested their prisoner 
to inquire of Zequiel what was his opinion of the doctrines of 
Luther and Erasmus ; and they were gratified beyond measure 
when they learned that he condemned the two reformers, with 
this difference only, that he considered Luther to be a_bad man, 
while he represented Erasmus as his superior in cunning and 
cleverness. Perhaps this piece of information bi'ought Torralva 
a little into favor, and his treatment was not so rigorous as that 



224 SORCERY AP^D MAGIC. 

experienced by many at the hands of the same prosecutors. On 
the 6th of March, 1531, he was condemned to make the general 
ordinary abjuration of heresies, to undergo the punishment of 
impris(Jnment and the san benito as long as it might please the 
inquisitor-general, to undertake to have no further communication 
with the spirit Zequiel, and never to lend an ear to any of his 
proposals. 

Although Torralva had been betrayed by one friend, he had 
others who remained faithful to him. Before his celebrated jour- 
ney to Rome, in 1525, he had been appointed to the office of 
physician to the family of the admiral of Castile, Don Frederico 
Enriquez, which he still held at the time of his arrest. The ad- 
miral had always proved himself a warm friend and a stanch 
protector ; he did not desert him in his trials, and it was no doubt 
to his influential interference that Torralva owed what indulgence 
was shown to him during his imprisonment. We have every 
reason to believe that it was through his protection also that soon 
after the process was ended, the inquisitor-general gave Torralva 
his pardon, and set him at liberty, in consequence, as it was pre- 
tended, of his sincere repentance. The admiral received the 
magician again as his physician, and continued his favor and 
protection to him. 

Such is the history, taken entirely from his own declarations 
and confessions, of a magician whose fame has been immortal- 
ized in Don Quixotte. 



CHAPTEU XIX. 

TRIAL OF THE EARL AND COUNTESS OF SOMERSET, 

The story of Doctor Torralva has drawn us a little from the 
chronological order of our chapters. The wholesale persecu- 
tion of the witches of Labourd in the French Basque territory, 
and the trial of those of Zugarramurdi, on the Spanish side of 
the frontier, give us a fair picture of the prevalence and inten- 
sity of the belief in sorcery among all the nations of Europe 
during the earlier years of the seventeenth century. We can 
not be surprised if, under these circumstances, the charge was 
often made a weapon of resentment and revenge, not only in the 
lowest, but sometimes evei> in the highest class of society, and 



THE COUNTESS OF ESSEX. 225 

if even people of rank and education were credulous enough to 
have recourse to the assistance of the sorcerer and witch. We 
will proceed to take a few examples of each of these cases, and 
our own country at this period furnishes us with one of the most 
extraordinary, and at the same time mysterious, tragedies that 
are to be found in our annals. 

No period of English history offers us so much that is dark 
and repugnant as the reign of James I. The private history of 
that monarch's court is very imperfectly known, and the few 
revelations that have been made are calculated to convince us 
that in this case "ignorance is bliss." Perhaps of all the mys- 
terious affairs of this reign, none present more difficulties than 
the history of James's first great favorite, Robert Carr. 

This man was of a respectable Scottish family, but he had re- 
ceived a mean education, and the merits which gained him the 
royal favor were* a " comely personage," and a taste in dress. 
The king's fondness for him was shown openly in an undignified 
manner ; for, to use the words of a nobleman who was in con- . 
stant attendance at King James's court, the mdnarch " would 
lean on his arm, pinch his cheek, smooth his ruffled garment, 
and, when directing discourse to others, nevertheless gaze on 
him." Such was -one of the principal heroes of the tragedy now 
to be related, but the person who appears most active in it was 
a lady. 

The lady Frances Howard, daughter of Thomas, earl of Suf- 
folk, and great niece of Henry Howard, earl of Northampton 
and lord high treasurer of England, had been married in 1606 
to Robert, earl of Essex, who was in after-life distinguished as 
the parliamentary leader. It was a marriage of family policy, 
and at the time it took place the bride was thirteen years of age, 
and the bridegroom only fourteen. The lady grew up to be one 
of the most dissolute of the ladies of James's court — which was 
not remarkable for its morality — and according to the court 
scandal of th3 day, she had intrigued with Prince Henry, and 
had " been cast off by him" on account of her notorious infidel- 
ity. At length the countess of Essex became passionately en- 
amoured of the king's favorite, who was raised to the peerage in 
the spring of 1611, under the title of Viscount Rochester. 

It appears that there were at the same time two separate in- 
trigues in progress to bring together Lord Rochester and the 
countess of Essex ; one had its foundation in interest alone, and 
the other was the offspring of ambition and love. 

The old courtiers were alarmed at the power of the young 



226 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

favorite, and were anxious to secure themselves by obtaining 
his favor, and none more so than the aged treasurer Henry, 
earl of Northampton. At the time when the commons ot Ji.ng- 
land were preparing to assert their dignity and rights a great 
part of the nobility seem to have sunk into a degree of baseness 
which it is not easy to imagine, and there appears but too mucti 
reason for believing that the earl of Northampton did not shrink 
from using the prostitution of his kinswoman to secure his intlu- 
ence at court. It was probably in that ancient and sad-looking 
mansion which still looks over the commencement of the btrand, 
and was then the earl's residence, and known as Northampton 
(now Northumberland) house, that the plot was managed whicti 
eventually led to the ill-fated marriage of which I am going to teli 
the consequences. The plotters are said to have employed in this 
intrioue a follower of the new favorite, named Copinger, at 
whose house the meetings between Lord Rochester and Lady 
Essex sometimes took place. _ . 

The lady, however, was too ardent in her passion to wait the 
effect of this intrigue, or perhaps she was not fully acquainted 
with the designs of her relatives. She made her confidante ot 
Mrs Anne Turner, the widow of a physician of respectability a 
woman not deficient in beauty, and who was at this time the 
mistress of Sir Arthur Mainwaring, an attendant on the prince. 
With this worthy companion in her evil doings, the countess re- 
paired to Dr. Simon Foreman, the magician, who, as has been 
stated, was living at Lambeth, and with whom Mrs. Turner ap- 
pears to have been already acquainted. It was soon agreed be- 
tween them that Foreman should by his magic bewitch the Lord 
Rochester, and so turn his affections that they should be irrevo- 
cably fixed on Lady Essex, and he was in the same way to in- 
fluence 'Sir Arthur Mainwaring toward Mrs. Turner. The 
intercourse between the ladies and the conjurer became now 
frequent, and he used all his skill in charms and images to eflect 
their desire. At a subsequent period Foreman's wife deposed 
in court " that Mrs. Turner and her husband would sometimes 
be locked upp in his studye for three or four howres together ;' 
and the countess became so intimate that she spoke of Foreman 

as her " sweet father." x i -n i. ^ i, ' 

The result of all these intrigues was that Lord Rochester be- 
came violently enamoured of the countess, and they formed an 
intimacy which soon assumed a criminal character. Their 
stolen meetings were held at Mrs. Turner's house in Paternos- 
ter-row at Copinger's, and elsewhere, and became a matter ot 



FOREMAN THE CONJURER. 227 

public scandal. But in the meanwhile a new obstacle had risen 
in the way of their criminal enjoyments. The young earl of Es- 
sex, who had been separated from his wife immediately after their 
premature marriage, returned from the wars abroad to claim his 
rights at home. The Lady Essex had scarcely known her hus- 
band, she could have no love toward him, and she was unwil- 
ling to relinquish her attachments and courtly tastes to live in 
private with a nobleman who never seems to have been much 
of a courtier. It required the earnest expostulations of her 
father to bring the young couple together, and when the earl of 
Essex, disturbed at the reports which soon reached him of her 
recent mode of life, took her to his house at Chartley, her cold- 
ness toward her lord was turned into intense hatred. 

Mrs. Turner was again sent to Foreman, who undertook to 
bewitch the earl of Essex in the contrary sense to that in v/hich. 
he had enchanted the viscount Rochester. New images were 
made, new charms invented, and the doctor furnished powders 
to be administered, and washes to bathe his linen, which were 
to render the earl of Essex incapable of loving his lady. The 
latter had been convinced that Foreman's charms had procured 
her the affection of her lover, and she was now disappointed at 
finding them ineffectual against her husband. Letters addressed 
by her at this time to Mrs. Turner and Dr. Foreman were pro- 
duced at a later period, in which she complained that " my lord 
is very well as ever he w-as," and expressed her aversion to him 
and her wish to be rid of him. 

In the midst of these dark transactions a new circumstance 
happened which threatened to impede their intrigues. This 
,was the sudden death of their grand agent. Doctor Foreman, 
who, to use the words of a manuscript report of the subsequent 
trial, " a little before his death desired he might be buryed very 
deepe in the ground, ' or else,' saith hee, ' I shall feare you all.' "* 
Foreman himself appears to have been apprehensive of the con- 

* Lilly received from Foreman's widow the following singular account of hia 
sudden death: " The Sunday night before he died, his wife and he being at sup- 
per in their garden-house, she being pleasant, told him, that she had been informed 
he could resolve whether man or wife should die first: 'Whether shall I,' quoth 
she, 'bury you or no?' — ' Oh, Trunco,' for so he called her, 'thou shalt bury me, 
but thou wilt much repent it.' — 'Yea, but how long first?' — ' I shall die,' said he, 
'ere Thursday night.' Monday came, all was well. Tuesday came, he not sick. 
Wednesday ca.nie, and still he was well ; with which his impertinent wife did 
much twit him iu his teeth. Thursday came, and dinner was ended, he veiy well : 
he went down to the water side, and'took a pair of oars to go to some buildings he 
was in hand with in Puddle-dock. Being in the middle of the Thames, he pres- 
ently fell down, only saying, ' An impost, an impost,' and sp died. A most sad 
storm of wind immediately following." 



228 SORCERY AND MAGIO. 

sequences of Ms dealings in this affair, for Lilly, who was ac- 
quainted with his widow, tells us that " he professed to her 
there would be much trouble about Carr and the countess of 
Essex, who frequently resorted unto him, and from whose com- 
pany he would sometimes lock himself in his study a whole 
day." Mrs. Foreman, when afterward examined in court, de- 
posed, that " Mrs. Turner came to her house immediatelye after 
her husband's death, and did demaund certaine pictures, which 
were in her husband's studye, namely, one picture in waxe, very 
sumptuously apparrelled in silke and sattin, as alsoe another sit- 
ting in forms of a naked woman, spreading and layinge forthe 
her haire in a glasse, which Mrs. Turner did confidentlye affirme 
to be in a boxe, and that she knewe in what part of the roome 
in the studye they were." Foreman is reported to have said, in 
reply to the expostulations of the countess, that the devil, as he 
had learned, had no power over the person of the earl of Essex ; 
yet she persisted in her designs, and after Foreman's death, an- 
other conjurer was employed, one Doctor Lavoire or Savory, as 
the name is differently written in different manuscripts. 

But a more powerful agent than the conjurers was now brought 
in. We have no means of ascertaining at what time King James 
was first made acquainted with the amorous intrigues of his favo- 
rite, but, as the latter was as anxious to get the lady Essex away 
from her husband as she was to leave him, the English Solomon 
resolved that both should be gratified. The countess was in- 
structed to bring against the earl of Essex a charge of conjugal 
incapacity, a commission of reverend prelates of the church was 
appointed to sit in judgment, over whom the king presided in per- 
son, and a jury of matrons was found to give their opinion that 
the lady Essex was a maiden. James seems to have gloated over 
this revolting process vfith the same degree of pleasure which 
he had derived from the examination of the witches in Edinbor- 
ough ; the earl of Essex appears to have made no opposition, and 
the king pressed with indecent eagerness a judgment of divorce. 
This being effected, the king, with no less indecency, hastened 
a irarriage between his favorite and the lady, with whose char- 
act..r he could not have been unacquainted, and heaped new hon- 
ors upon the former for this occasion. On the 3d of November, 
1613, Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester, was elevated to the rank 
and title of earl of Somerset ; and on St. Stephen's day (Decem- 
ber 26), King James gave the lady to his minion at the altar, and 
the marriage was celebrated by the court with unusual splendor. 
There was one circumstance connected with this guilty mar- 



SIR THOMAS OVERBURY. 229 

riage, or at least contemporaneous witli the intrigues which have 
just been described, that become in the sequel the foundation of 
events still more extraordinary. 

Sir Thomas Overbury, who is known by literary compositions 
of some merit, was almost as much the favorite of Carr in the 
earlier period of his fortunes, as Carr was of the king ; and al- 
though represented in the common published accounts as a man 
of honorable character, there appears to be not wanting grounds 
for suspecting that he Avas a fit companion for the monarch and 
his favorite. It appears from documents afterward brought for- 
ward, that Sir Thomas Overbury exercised for several years the 
extraordinary vocation of imparting ideas and language to the 
earl of Somerset, as to a puppet, who, by means of his secret 
suggestions, moved the inclinations of King James which way 
he would, governed councils, and fascinated the beauties of the 
court ; and that he crowned his various achievements by writing 
love-letters in his patron's name, through which Lady Essex 
was led to indulge a guilty passion. Yet strangely enough, 
when his patron resolved to marry his mistress, and was sup- 
ported in that resolution by the open approval and encourage- 
ment of his sovereign, Overbury is represented as putting him- 
self forward indiscreetly to oppose the marriage, and as thus 
drawing upon himself the hatred of the favorite and his mistress. 
It was determined by some means or other to get Overbury out of 
the way ; the king, at the instigation (as it is said) of Somerset 
and the earl of Northampton, offered to send him embassador to 
Russia, and when (also, it is said, at Somerset's suggestion) he 
refused the employment, James, in a fit of anger, ordered him to 
be comm.itted close prisoner to the tower. Here Overbury lin- 
gered in a sickly state of body till the 19th of October, 1613, 
when he died. 

For a Avhile after the marriage, the king's attachment to the 
earl of Somerset seemed to increase from day to day, and honors 
and riches were showered thick upon him, but at length it was 
perceived that James began to be tired of his favorite, and his 
enemies seized the opportunity to conspire his ruin. Among 
these, the archbishop of Canterbury, Abbott, with whom Somer- 
set had quarrelled, was one of the most active, and he has left 
us an account of the way in which these intrigues were carried 
on. " We could have no way so good," says the archbishop, 
" to effectuate that which was the common desire, as to bring in 
another in his room ; one nail the proverb is, being to be driven 
out by another. It was now observed that the king began to cast 

20 



230 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

his eye upon George Villiers, who was then cup-bearer, and 
seemed a modest and courteous youth. But King James had a 
fashion, that he would never admit any one to nearness about 
himself, but such a one as the queen should commend to him, 
and make some suit in that behalf, in order that, if the queen af- 
terward, being ill-treated, should complain of this dear one, he 
might make this answer, ' It is come of yourself, for you were 
the party that commended him unto me.' Our old master took 
delight in things of this nature." The queen hated Somerset, 
and after a good deal of communications and intriguing, she con- 
sented to act the part required ; and Villiers was appointed a 
gentleman of the chamber, in spite of the opposition of the old 
favorite, who was made to feel more and more that he was losing 
favor with the king. Still the king continued outwardly to show 
him the same attention as before, and even increased his honors, 
by which he was lulled into security, while a deep plot was laid 
for his final overthrow, in which James, daily more attached to 
the new object, appears to have concurred. 

All who looked forward for advancement through the new fa- 
vorite were zealous in persecuting the old one, and among these 
were Sir Ralph Winwood, one of the secretaries of state, and a 
creature of Villiers, and Sir Francis Bacon, to whom Villiers 
held out the prospect of the chancellorship of England. The 
first of these got up the accusation on which Somerset was tried, 
and the second was employed to conduct the prosecution. It 
was stated that Sir Thomas Overbury had been poisoned in the 
Tower by agents of the countess and earl of Somerset, that his 
body had been hastily and privately buried Avithout having been 
shown even to his friends, and that Somerset's power over the 
king had been used to hush up and conceal the crime. Several 
inferior agents were committed to prison, and by the king's or- 
ders a warrant was made to arrest the earl of Somerset, which 
is said to have been executed after he left the king's presence at 
Royston. In the lasf scene of this court drama, the king exhib- 
ited the most heartless duplicity. The following account is given 
by an eyewitness, Sir Anthony Weldon : — 

" The king with this took his farewell for a time of London, 
and was accompanied with Somerset to Royston, where no soon- 
er he brought him, but the earle instantly took his leave, little 
imagining what viper lay among the herbs. Nor must I forget 
to let you know how perfect the king was in the art of dissimO- 
lation, or, to give it his own phrase, kingcraft. The earle of 
Somerset never parted from him with more seeming aiFection 



TRIAL OF THE EAEL OF SOMERSET. 231 

than at this time, when he knew Somerset should never see him 
more ; and had you seen that seeming affection (as the author 
himselfe did), you would rather have believed he was in his 
rising than setting. The earle, when he kissed his hand, the 
king hung about his neck, slabbering his cheeks, saying: — 

" ' For God's sake, when shall I see thee againe ? On ray 
soule, I shall neither eat nor sleep until you come agaiue V 

" The earle told him on Monday (this being on the Friday) — 

" ' For God's sake, let me,' said the king, ' shall I, shall I V 
then lolled about his neck. ' Then for God's sake, give thy lady 
this kiss for me.' 

" In the same manner, at the stayres' head, at the middle of the 
stayres, and at the stayres foot. The earl was now in his coach 
when the king used these very words (in the hearing of four ser- 
vants, of whom one was Somerset's great creature, and of the 
bed-chamber, who reported it instantly to the author of this his- 
tory), ' I shall never see his face more.' " 

The earl was placed under arrest on his return to London, but 
instead of proceeding to an examination of the two principal 
offenders, the minor actors in the tragedy were first brought to 
trial. The object in view from the beginning appears to have 
been to bring forward as little evidence as possible, but to use 
every means of inducing the various persons accused to con- 
fess themselves guilty and accuse their supposed employers. 
Although at first some of them obstinately denied any knowledge 
of the crime imputed to them, they all ended by confessing what- 
ever was required, influenced either by hope or fear, and when 
their confessions had been obtained, they were hurried to the 
gallows with as little delay as possible. We can hardly doubt, 
from the evidence, that the countess of Somerset had been anx- 
ious for Overbury's death, and that she had suborned persons to 
poison him, but it certainly did not appear by the evidence that 
he had been poisoned by them. 

During these trials the public excitement was so great that 
Westminster hall was intensely crowded, and immense sums 
were given for places on the scaffolding erected for the occasion. 
This was especially the case on the 7th of November, 1615, the 
day when Mrs. Turner was arraigned, and a feeling of supersti- 
tious fear seized on the assemblage when on that occasion the 
insti-uments of Foreman's conjurations were exposed to view. It 
appears that when Mrs. Turner was arrested, she sent her maid 
in haste to Foreman's widow, to warn her that the privy council 
would probably give orders to search her house, and to urge her 



232 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

to burn any of her husband's papers that were calculated to com- 
promise her. Mrs. Foreman saw that the trouble her husband 
foretold had arrived, and she followed the suggestion thus con- 
ve}'ed to her, but a few documents were preserved that were now 
brought into court, and among these were the two guilty letters 
addressed by Lady Essex from Chartley, to Mrs. Turner and 
Foreman, which according to some accounts, had been found in 
the conjuror's pockets after his sudden death. The various ar- 
ticles which Avere seized in Foreman's house related to the at- 
tempts to enchant the earls of Somerset and Essex, and not to 
the murder of Overbury. " There was shewed in court cer- 
teine pictures of a man and a woman made in lead, and also a 
mould of brasse wherein they were cast, a blacke scarfe alsoe full 
of white crosses, which Mrs. Turner had in her custodie ;" in ad- 
dition to vi^hich there were " iachanted paps and other pictures." 
These might be innocent enough, if they had not been fol- 
lowed by a parcel of Foreman's written charms and conjura- 
tions. " In some of these parchments," says the contemporary 
report of the trial in the manuscript from which we are quoting, 
" the devill had particular names, who were conjured to torment 
the Lord Somersett and Sir Arthur Mannering, if theire loves 
should not contynue, the one to the countesse, the other to Mrs. 
Turner." The horror caused by these, jr§velations was so great, 
that the multitude assembled in the hall involuntarily led into the 
delusion that the demons were present among them, witnessing 
the exposure of their victims, and suddenly in the midst of this 
sensation, " there was heard a crack from the scaffold which car- 
ryed a great feare, tumult, and commotion, among the spectators 
and through the hall, every one feareing hurt, as if the devill had 
bine present and growen angry to have his workemanshipp 
knowne by such as were not his owne schoUars." The reporter 
adds, " There was alsoe a note showed in courte, made by Doc- 
tor Foreman, and written in parchment, signifying what ladyes 
loved what lords in the court, but the lord chiefe-justice would 
not suffer it to be read openly in courte." This "note," or book, 
is understood to have been a diary of Foreman's dealings with 
the persons implicated ; and, according to the scandal of the 
time, the reason why my lord-chief-justice objected to reading it 
was, that his own wife's name was the first which caught his eye 
on opening it.* Mrs. Turner had been a favorite with the court 

"* Had we Foreman's private diaries for this period, tbey would no doubt throw 
much light on contemporary history. The immorality of the conjuror's private char- 
acter is sufficiently evinced by that portion of his secret diaries privately printed by 
Mr. Halliwell. 



TE,IAL OF THE EARL OF SOMERSET. 233 

ladies on account of her skill in im^enting new fasliions ; fully 
aware that it was useless to make any defence, she sought to 
moye compassion by representing that she was a mere servant 
to the will of people of higher rank, on whom she had to depend 
for the support of herself and children. Her fate is said to have 
excited much commiseration. 

Several months were allowed to elapse after the execution of 
the minor agents, on whose confessions these charges rested, 
before the great offenders were proceeded against. The countess 
of Somerset was brought to her trial on the 24th of May, 1616, 
and she at once pleaded guilty, under'the evident impression that 
this plea was to merit a pardon. This had no doubt been ar- 
ranged beforehand. There remained nothing now but to con- 
demn the earl, whose trial was fixed for the day following, the 
25th of May ; but he it appears, was more difficult to deal with 
than the other prisoners. The conduct of the king and the earl 
on this occasion was calculated to excite extraordinary suspi- 
cions ; for the reports of the trial and the version of the story 
which came before the public were evidently drawn up for the 
purpose of deceiving. An attempt has been made to throw some 
light on these mysterious transactions by Mr. Amos, who has ex- 
amined the documents relating to this trial preserved in the state- 
paper office, and has collected the materials which we are now 
to use.* 

The letters of Bacon, v/hose conduct throughout these trials 
was, to say the least, most unmanly, show us that the king looked 
forward to the trial of Somerset with the greatest uneasiness, 
and that every effort was made to induce him to admit the justice 
of the prosecution, even by the promise of the king's pardon. 
Bacon writes to Sir George Villiers, on the second of May, 
" That same little charm, which may be secretly infused into 
Somerset's ear some few hours before his trial, was excellently 
well thought of by his majesty, and I do approve it both for mat- 
ter and time ; only, if it seems good to his majesty ... I could 
wish it were made a little stronger, by giving him some hopes 
that his majesty will be good to his lady and child, &c. . . For 
the person that should deliver this message, I am not so well 
seen in the region of his friends, as to be able to make choice of 
a particular ; my lord treasurer, the lord Knollys, or any of his 
nearest friends, should not be trusted with it, for they may go 

* The Grand Oyer of Poisoiiiag: the Trial of the Earl of Somerset, for the Poi- 
soniag of Sir Thomas Overbuiy in the Tower of London. By Andrew Amos, Esq. 
London, Bentley, 1846. 

20* 



234 . SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

too far, and perhaps work contrary to his majesty's ends. Those 
which occur to me are my Lord Hay,myLord Burleigh, of England 
I mean, and Sir Robert Carre." On May 5th, Bacon writes to 
Villiers, after stating his opinion that the " resuscitation of Som- 
erset's fortune" would be impolitic : " But yet the glimmering of 
that which the king hath done to others, by way of talk to him, 
can not hurt, as I conceive ; but I would not have that part of the 
message as from the king, but added by the messeng'er as from 
himself . . . The time I wish to be the Tuesday, being the even 
of his lady's arraignment; for, as his majesty first conceived, I 
would not have it stay in hi's stomach too long, lest it sour in the 
digestion." He was, in fact, to be taken by surprise, and not 
left time for calm reflection. Several other letters and papers of 
Bacon contain similar intimations ; and it appears from one, that 
while the countess and her husband were kept perfectly in the 
secret as to what course the other was pursuing, or what evi- 
dence existed against the other, they were still played off against 
each other. Bacon says, on the tenth of May, " It is thought 
that at the day of her trial the lady will confess the indictment ; 
which, if she do, no evidence ought to be given. But because 
it shall not be a dumb show, and for his majesty's honor in so 
solemn an assembly, I purpose to make a declaration of the pro- 
ceedings of this great work of justice, from the beginning to the 
end, wherein, nevertheless, I will be careful no ways to prevent 
or discover the evidence of the next day. In this my lord-chan- 
cellor and I have likewise used a point of providence ; for I did 
forecast, that if in that narrative, by the connection of things, 
anything should be spoken that should show him guilty, she might 
break forth into passionate protestations /or his clearing ; which, 
though it may be justly made light of, yet it is better avoided ; 
therefore, my lord-chancellor and I have devised, that upon the 
entrance into that declaration she shall, in respect of her weak- 
ness, and not to add further affliction, he withdrawn^ In a paper 
of questions for the management of the earl's trial, in Bacon's 
handwriting, it is suggested, " Whether, if my lord of Somerset 
should break forth into any speech of taxing the king, he be not 
presently by the lord-steward to be interrupted and silenced; 
and, if he persist, he be not to be told, that if he take that course, 
he is to be withdrawn, and evidence to be given in his absence^ It 
must be observed, that there is no intimation that Somerset had 
ever threatened to save himself by accusing the king, so that the 
fear on that head must have arisen from some great misgiving on 
the part of the latter. 



THE KING'S FEARS. 235 

Sir George Moore had been appointed lieutenant of the Tow- 
er when Somerset was committed, and in his family have been 
preserved the autograph letters which the king addressed to him 
during the preparations for the trial.* From these, we see how 
anxiously James was acting in the views expressed in the above 
extracts from Bacon's letters. In the first of the king's letters, 
dated on the ninth of May, James says to Sir George Moore, 
" As the only confidence I had in your honesty made me, with- 
out the knowledge of any, put you in that place of trust which 
you now possess, so must I now use your trust and secrecy in a 
thing greatly concerning my honor and service ;" and he then 
desires him to admit, in the greatest secrecy, to his prisoner, a 
private messenger, who was to persuade him to confess. On the 
13th of May, the king writes again, " Although I fear that the 
last message I sent to your unfortunate prisoner shall not take 
the effect that I wish it should, yet I can not leave off to use all 
means possible to move him to do that which is. most honorable 
for me, and his own best. You shall, therefore, give him assu- 
rance in my name, that if he will yet before his trial confess 
clearly unto the commissioners his guiltiness of this fact, I will 
not only perform what I promised by my last messenger, both 
toward him and his wife, but I will enlarge it . . . Assure him, 
tliat I protest upon my honor, my end in this is for his and his 
wife's good ; you will do well, likewise, of yourself to cast out 
imto him, that you fear his wife shall plead weakly for his in?io- 
cence, and that you find the commissioners have, you know not 
how, some secret assurance that, in the end, she will confess of 
him; but this must only be as from yourself, and therefore you 
must not let him know that I have written to you ... if he re- 
main obstinate, I desire not that you should trouble me with an 
answer ; for it is to no end, and no news is better than evil news." 
In another letter, undated, the king speaks in the same strain, 
and adds, " It is easy to be seen that he would threaten me, with 
laying an aspersion upon me of being in some sort accessory to 
his crime ;" and in a fourth, which appears to have been written 
early on the morning of the trial, James gave some curious di- 
rections what should be done with the earl, in case he refused to 
go to the trial. It appears that Somerset did not believe that the 
king would allow him to be brought to a public trial. 

These letters to Sir George Moore furnish a striking confir- 
mation of Sir Anthony Weldon's narrative of what took place on 

'* They are now at Losel^', iu Surrey, and were printed in Kemp's " Losely 
Papers." 



236 SORCERY AND MAGIO. 

the eve of the trial, which will be best given in his own-words ; 
" And now, for the last act, enters Somerset himselfe on the stage, 
who (being told, as the manner is, by the lieutenant, that he 
must provyde to goe next day to his tryal) did absolutely refuse 
it, and said they should carry him in his bed — that the king had 
assured him he should not come to any tryal, neither durst the 
king bring him to tryal. This was in an high strain, and in a 
language not well undei-stood by Sir George Moore (then lieu- 
tenant in Elwaies his room), that made Moore quiver and shake ; 
and however he was accounted a wise man, yet he was neare at 
his wits end. Yet away goes Moore to Greenewich^ as late as 
it was (being twelve at night), bounseth at the back stayres as if 
mad, to whom came Jo. Loveston, one of the grooms, out of his 
bed, inquires the reason of that distemper at so late a season. 
Moore tells him he must speak with the king. Loveston re- 
plyes, ' He is quiet,' (which in the Scottish dialect, is fast 
asleep). Moore says, 'You must awake him.' Moore was 
called in (the chamber left to the king and Moore). He tells 
the king those passages, and desired to be directed by the king, 
for he was gone beyond his owne reason, to heare such bold 
and undutifui expressions from a faulty subject against a just 
sovereigne. The king fails into a passion of tears : ' On my 
soule, Moore, I wot not what to do! Thou art a wise man ; 
help me in this great strait, ajad thou shalt finde thou dost it for 
a thankful master ;' Avith other sad expressions. Moore leaves 
the king in that passion, but assures him he will prove the ut- 
most of his wit to serve his majesty ; and was really rewarded 
with a suit, worth to him £1,500 (although Annandale, his great 
friend, did cheat him of one half; so was there falsehood in 
friendship). Sir George Moore returns to Somerset about three 
next morning of that day he was to come to triall, enters Som- 
erset's chamber, tells him he had been with the king, found him 
a most affectionate master unto him, and full of grace in his in- 
tentions toward him. ' But,' said he, ' to satisfie justice you 
must appeare, although returne instantly againe, without any fur- 
ther proceedings ; only you shall know your enemies and their 
malice, though they shall have no power over you.' With this 
trick of wit he allayed his fury, and got him quietly, about eight 
in the morning, to the hall ; yet feared his former bold language 
might revert againe, and being brought by this trick into the 
toile, might have more enraged him to fly out into some strange 
discovery ; for prevention whereof he had two servants placed 
on each side of him, with a cloak on their arms, giving them 



SOMERSET'S TRIAL. 237 

withall a peremptory order, if that Somerset did any way fly out 
on the king, tliey should instantly hoodwink him with their 
cloaks, take him violently from the bar, and carry him away; 
for which he v/ould secure them from any danger, and they 
should not want also a bountiful reward. But the earle, finding 
himself overreached, recollected a better temper, and went on 
calmly in his Iryall, where he held the company until seven at 
night. But who had seen the king's restlesse motion all that 
day, sending to every boat he saw landing at the bridge, cursing 
all thai came without tidings, would have easily judged all was 
not right, and there had been some grounds for his feares of 
Somerset's boldnesse ; but at last one bringing him word he was 
condemned and the passages, all was quiet. This is the very 
relation from Moore's owne mouth, and this told verbatim in 
Wanstaad Parke, to two gentlemen (of which the author was 
one), who were both left by him to their own freedome, without 
engaging them, even in those times of high distemperatures, 
unto a faithful secresie in concealing it, yet, though he failed ia 
his wisdome, they failed not in that worth inherent in every 
noble spirit, never speaking of it till after the king's death." 

Somerset's trial was, in every respect, a mere mockery of jus- 
tice. He was tried, not by his peers in parliament, but by a 
select number of peers chosen for the occasion, who were his 
personal enemies or creatures of the court. His judges again 
urged him to plead guilty, intimating that his wife had made a 
confession that implicated him, and holding out the prospect of 
a full pardon as the reward of his confession. When he still in- 
sisted upon his innocence, they brought against him no witnesses, 
but merely adduced as evidence the confessions of the persons 
who had already been hanged, and who had never been confront- 
ed with the man they accused. On the contrary, one gentle- 
man. Sir John Lidcot, no friend of Somerset's, having presumed, 
on the scaflbld, to ask Weston, who it was pretended had deliv- 
ered the poison, whether he had poisoned Overbury or not, was 
thrown into the Tower and treated harshly. Late in the after- 
noon the earl began an able and eloquent defence, in which he 
explained away or denied every circumstance adduced to show 
that he knew of the murder ; and he insisted that his assertions 
ought to have greater weight with the court than those of con- 
demned felons, proved by their own confessions to be persons 
of base character, and whom he had no opportunity of cross ex- 
amining. The peers found him guilty. 

When we look even at the report of Somerset's trial, which 



238 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

was published to the world by those who were far from being 
friends to him, we are struck with the unsatisfactory character 
of the evidence upon which he was condemned. But our aston- 
ishment is increased when we read the original depositions of 
the pretended agents, many of which are fortunately preserved 
in the state paper office, and are now, for the first time, pub- 
lished by Mr. Amos. We there find these witnesses, in state- 
ments drawn from them, it would appear, by the most unworthy 
means, contradicting one another, and contradicting themselves ; 
so much so that these papers would lead us almost necessarily 
to the conclusion that there was no poisoning at all. They are 
mostly in the handwriting of Coke, who directed the examina- 
tion of the persons accused, and are covered with notes and 
erasures b)^ Bacon, who conducted, under the immediate direc- 
tion of the king, the prosecution ; and we discover from these 
notes, and from a comparison of the extracts read in court at the 
trial, that Bacon not only suppressed carefully everything that 
would tell in favor of the earl of Somerset, but that he altered 
phrases and falsified the original in order to make a direct ac- 
cusation of what in that oi;iginal was little better than a sujiposi- 
tion. 

It is clear from the original depositions that Sir Thomas Over- 
bury was either not poisoned, or that he must have been poisoned 
by the king's own physician, who constantly attended upon him 
in the Tower. This is a very important circumstance, and was 
entirely concealed from the public. In fact, during the whole 
course of proceedings in this strange aftair, no attempt was made 
to prove that Overbury did die of poison, but that was taken as 
an acknowledged fact. The king and the public prosecutors 
seem to have acted on the mere personal conviction that such 
Avas the case. The king's physician, Mayerne, who, as we 
have said, had attended on the deceased, and prescribed con- 
stantly for him, was not examined at all, nor were any medical 
men brought forward to give an opinion on the cause which" h^-d 
produced death. It is proved by the depositions in the- state 
paper office, that an inquest was held on the body, that^his 
friends were .permitted to visit it, and that no particular secrecy 
was observed ; yet not only were no physicians brought forward 
on the trial to state if any marks of the presence of poison had 
been observed on the body, but the depositions on this subject 
were concealed, and it was represented falsely that the body had 
been buried hastily and privately, and that Overbury's friends 
had not been allowed access to it. Several persons who might 



MYSTERIOUS CHARACTER OF THE TRIAL. 239 

have given important evidence on the trial, had mere truth been 
sought, were certainly kept out of the way. 

Mr. Amos points out the improbability of the whole story of 
the poisoning, as it was made the groundwork of the trial, and 
we may fairly doubt if it were not a fiction to cover circumstan- 
ces which could not safeh^ be revealed. We learn from the nar- 
rative of Sir Anthony Weldon, that Franklin, one of the minor 
agents, confessed that Sir Thomas Overbury was smothered by 
him and Weston, and was not poisoned. " The suspicious cir- 
cumstance that none of Franklin's examinations taken before his 
trial are forthcoming, gives some countenance to this report." 
Mr. Amos's book contains a mass of evidence on this and other 
points which my space will not allow me to transfer to this re- 
view of the subject. 

It must be confessed that, even with the important additional 
evidence thus brought to light, the history of Sir Thomas Over- 
bury's murder is still clouded in mystery. The conclusion to 
which we are naturally led by the foregoing facts is, that any 
satisfactory evidence which could have been brought forward 
would have involved other accomplices, whose names it was ne- 
cessary to keep carefully from public suspicion, and that the real 
object of the prosecution was the ruin and disgrace of the favor- 
ite, whom at last James, actuated by fear or some other motive, 
did not sacrifice to the utmost extent of the wishes of his ene- 
mies. The presumption is indeed strong that the murder was 
authorized by King James himself. This supposition, at least, 
explains various circumstances which are otherwise totally inex- 
plicable. We thus understand why the minor agents in the plot, 
and especially the unfortunate lieutenant of the Tower (Sir Ger- 
vais Helwysse), and Overbury's jailer, Weston, were so summa- 
rily despatched out of the world. We thus understand the tam- 
pering with their depositions, which, with all the arrangements 
for the trial, were made according to the king's own directions. 
And still more, we understand James's anxiety to prevent Som- 
erset's anticipated revelations. 

With this new view of the subject, we are led further to ask 
for a reason for this extraordinary state murder, and here at 
present we are left entirely to conjecture. The common story 
that Overbury's murder was a mere act of revenge for his oppo- 
sition to the marriage of Somerset with the countess of Essex, 
has always appeared to me to be in the highest degree improba- 
ble, when we consider the part he appears to have previously 
acted in promoting Somerset's amours, and the part which he 



240 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

knew the king was acting in promoting the marriage. It- now 
appears in the light of a cover for some other transactions, in- 
vented probably by the king, but in which Somerset acquiesced 
in the trial, because it did not necessarily involve his own guilt 
(as he only acknowledged to having been the means of sending 
Overbury to the Tower), and because he could not confute it 
without making revelations which he had then determined not to 
make. It is certain from passages of contemporary letters and 
papers, that, at the time when Sir Thomas Overbury Avas com- 
mitted to the Tower, no such excuse for his committal was talked 
of, but that, on the contrary, it was looked upon generally as a 
mysterious transaction in which the favorite had no direct share, 
except that some persons imagined that the anger of the king to- 
ward his friend portended a diminution in the influence of the 
favorite himself. A Mr. Packer, in a letter from the court to 
Sir Ralph Winwood, dated April 22, 1613, mentions that the 
king sent the lord-chancellor and Lord Pembroke to off'er an 
" embassage" to Sir Thomas Overbury, which Sir Thomas im- 
mediately refused, and that, some said, " he added some other 
speech which was very ill taken," and that thereupon the king 
sent for the council, and after making an angry speech, gave 
orders to them to send Overbury to prison. .Other reasons were 
also suggested. A courtier, in a letter dated the 6th of May, 
1613, writes, "Some say, Lord Rochester took Sir T. Over- 
bury's committing to heart. Others talk as if it were a great 
diminution of his favor and credit, which the king doubting, 
would not have it so construed ; but the next day told the council 
that he meant him more grace and favor, as should be seen in a 
short time, and that he took more delight and contentment in his 
company and conversation than in any man's living." On the 
27th of May, 1613, Sir H. Weston Avrites : " Sir Thomas Over- 
bury is still where he was (in the Tower), and as he was, with- 
out any alteration; the viscount Rochester no way sinking in 
point of favor, which are two strange consistents." The earl 
of Southampton, writing to Sir Ralph Winwood, on the 4th of 
August, 1613,-says, "• And much ado there hath been to keep Sir 
Thomas Overbury from a public censure of banishment and loss 
of oflice, such a rooted hatred lyeth in the king's heart toward him. 
The most probable supposition that we can make is, that 
Overbury was possessed of important royal secrets, which the 
king had reasons for fearing he might disclose, or that he had 
been a participator in crimes or vices which made him a danger- 
ous person. According to hints thrown out by Mr. Amos, the dis- 



LA MARECHALE D'ANCRE. 241 

covery of the secret would, perhaps, reveal scenes of royal de- 
pravity which it were as well should remain unknown. It is 
certain that there was at the time an opinion abroad, that Sir 
Thomas Overbury had been an agent in evil deeds. He was 
even very commonly suspected of having had some hand in pro- 
curing the death of Prince Henry, who was far from being a 
favorite with his father, who hated the favorite, and who was 
popularly believed to have ieen poisoned. There are a few 
very remarkable passages in the papers of the time, relating to 
this event, which certainly, when put together, tend to raise sus- 
picion, and Sir Edward Coke excited the king's anger to the 
highest degree, and was the cause of Sir Thomas Monson's 
trial being abruptly put a stop to, bj' an unguarded expression in 
court, which alluded to those suspicions against Overbury, and 
which it is said that James never forgave. 



CHAPTER XX. 

LA MARECHALE d'aNCRE. 



While this tragedy was acting in England, a somewhat simi- 
lar one, though under different circumstances, was in progress 
in France. 

On the death of Henri IV., slain by the assassin Ravaillac in 
1610, his son, Louis XIII. being but a child, the royal power 
fell into the hands of the queen mother, Marie de Medicis. 
Among the servants attached to Marie before her marriage, was 
a woman of extraordinary address and talent, the daughter of 
Marie's nurse, named Eleonora Dori, or, a name she adopted 
afterward, Eleonora Galigai. She soon became a great favor- 
ite with her mistress, whom she accompanied into France as a 
confidential attendant, and she gradually gained an unbounded 
influence over Henri's queen. One of the gentlemen followers 
of the queen was a Florentine, named Concino Concini, whose 
grandfather was secretary to the grand duke Cosmo, but the 
property he had scraped together was dissipated by his chil- 
dren, and Concino, who had passed his youth so wildly that it is 
said to have become almost proverbial for parents to warn their 
children of his example, was in indigent circumstances. Iri 
consequence of this, he went to seek his fortune at Rome, where 

21 



242 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

he entered tlie service of the cardinal of Lorraine, who was then 
there, but he did not return with him to France. On the mar- 
riage of Marie de Medicis, he obtained, as has just been stated, a 
place in her household, and seeing the influence of Eleonora 
Galigai, he paid his court to her, and, with the queen's approba- 
tion, married her. The king is said to have looked on Concini 
with disfavor, and to have been opposed to the marriage. 

When Marie de Medicis became ruler of France, the influence 
of Concini and his wife was immediately apparent. She was a 
woman of intelligence and prudence, but her husband was bold 
and hardy of temper, ambitious and overbearing, and was never 
at rest till he made his influence apparent to every one. His 
insolence increased with tire queen's power, and he exhibited it 
in an offensive manner toward the old French nobles of the 
court of the great Henri. These frequently leagued together 
against him, and had recourse to arms, but having the power of 
the state at his command, he proceeded against them as rebels, 
and forced them to submission. Thus the period while the Con- 
cini were in power was for France a time of turbulence and dis- 
tress. 

Immediately after the king's death, Concini was made first 
gentleman of the chamber, and was rewarded with other lucra- 
tive posts. He was thus enabled to purchase the raarquisate of 
Ancre, in Picardy, Avhich title he now assumed. In 1613, the 
marquis d'Ancre was for a short time in disfavor, but he was 
soon restored, and then he was created marechal of France. 
With all these dignities, he also held the important office of 
governor of Normandy. 

In 1615, the nobles, irritated at the manner in which they were 
treated by one whom they looked on as a mere upstart, and who 
had no talents to support, his influence, which he owed only to 
his wife and to his own devotion to the service of the queen, 
were already plotting his overthrow ; and although they then 
failed, they were indefatigable in their efforts to aggravate the 
populace and men of all ranks against him. During this and the 
following years his unpopularity increased daily. In 1616, he 
oflTered an unnecessary and unwise provocation to the Parisians. 
A citizen named Picard had the command of the watch, at the 
gate of Bussy, one night, when the queen's Italian minister was 
passing that way with his carriage. Picard; urged probably by 
the general dislike which the people of Paris bore to the mare- 
chal d'Ancre, refused to open the gate till the latter had shown 
his passport. The marechal ordered two of his valets to seize 



CONSPIRACY AGAmST THE MAEECHAL. 213 

Picard, and administer a severe beating to him, as a punishment 
for the affront. The populace rose, seized the two valets, and 
hanged them on two gallows at the door of Picard's house, who 
from this moment became a hero among the Parisians. 

Although the marechal's wife was more cautious of giving per- 
sonal offence, her manners and character were equally unpopular. 
She was eccentric, loved to live apart from the world, and was 
of a suspicious and unsociable temper. She was, moreover, su- 
perstitious, and attributed her constant state of ill-health to the 
effects of sorcery. She caused herself frequently to be exorcised 
by Italian priests, and always had her face veiled in public to 
screen her from the gaze of i guardatori, as she expressed it, — 
against the influence of the evil eye. These peculiarities, joined 
with the belief that she principally ruled the queen-mother, made 
her equally with her husband an object of popular odium. Peo- 
ple accused her of practising the very sorcery which she suspect- 
ed in others, and it was widely believed that she had bewitched 
the queen. 

The marechal had two children by his wife, a son and a 
daughter. The latter died in 1616, to the great grief of her pa- 
rents ; her father is said to have looked upon this blow to his 
affections as a warning from above that his own fall was ap- 
proaching, and his apprehensions were so great, that he proposed 
to his wife to retire Irom political life, and take refuge in Italy. 
But she was confident in her influence with the queen, and per- 
suaded him to stay. 

As the period of the favorite's downfall approached, people 
became bolder in their attacks upon both, and less reserved in 
their speech. Scandalous anecdotes were sent abroad, and bitter 
and angry epigrams were published in abundance. People as- 
sailed them in coarse puns on the words ancre and encre, and 
these were even uttered in the queen's presence. It is reported, 
that when one day the queen-mother said to one of her attend- 
ants, " Apportez-?noi mon mile," the Comte du Lude, who was 
standing by, remarked, with a smile, " Un navire qui est a I'Ancre 
n'a pas autrement besoin de voiles." 

It was to one who had risen into importance at court partly 
by his favor, Charles d'Albert, due de Luynes, that the marechal 
d' Ancre eventually owed his fall. This nobleman saw that his 
own power would be the immediate consequence of the destruc- 
tion of his rival. He nourished in every possible way the pop- 
ular feeling against him, and he instilled" all sorts of suspicions 
into the mind of the young king. The latter was getting tired 



214 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

of his mother's rule, and the restraint in which he was held by 
her minister, and though still not much more than a child, he was 
anxious to assume the reins of government. He therefore en- 
tered eagerly into the conspiracy ; and when the duke and the 
other conspirators saw their time was come, they strengthened 
the king's resolution by dark insinuations that the minister was 
meditating the destruction of his royal person, as a means of 
rendering his own influence perpetual. 

Even with the king's authority, the enemies of the raarechal 
d'Ancre did not dare to attack their victim in a fair and open 
way, but it was resolved to effect their object by assassination. 
For this purpose they tool?' into their confidence the Baron de 
Vitry, D'Ancre's bitterest personal enemy, and his brother Du 
Hallier, and the king not only authorized them to commit the 
murder, but promised to reward Vitry with the marechal's staff. 
Some other desperate characters were joined with them. 

On the morning of the 24th of April, 1617, the king rose early 
in the morning and announced a parti de chasse. Preparations 
were immediately made, and the horses and carriages brought 
out. Under cover of this announcement, Vitry, Du Hallier, and 
their fellow-assassins, were collected within the gateway of the 
palace. The marechal d'Ancre had not himself apartments in 
the Louvre, but he lodged in a house which formed what was 
called the capatainerie of the Louvre, at the end of the garden 
toward the present Rue du Coq, where this garden was entered 
by a little bridge which was called popularly the Pont d'Amour. 
A person was placed to watch this bridge, while the conspirators 
waited for the signal to inform them that the marechal was in 
view. This signal was given about ten o'clock in the forenoon, 
and the conspirators overtook their victim as he was entering 
upon the Pont du Louvre. The Baron de Vitry was so fierce 
and eager that he passed the marechal before he was aware of 
him, and was called back by his brother Du Hallier. One or 
two pistols were then discharged at him, on which he fell 
wounded, and they instantly despatched him with their swords. 

The young king, in the utmost anxiety, had seized his arque- 
buse, and he now came forward to the window to encourage the 
assassins, shouting out publicly, " I thank you, gentlemen : now 
I am king indeed !" The persons to whom these words were 
addressed had the baseness not only to share the plunder of the 
marechal's person, but they afterward disputed the merit of having 
struck the first blow, for the sake of the reward. When the mare- 
chale heard of her husband's fate, she hurried to her chamber, un- 



OUTRAGES ON THE MARECHAL'S BODY. 245 

dressed herself, and went to bed, hiding under her her own jew- 
els, and the jewels of the crown, which were intrusted to her 
care, to save them. But the assassins came and, dragging her 
roughly out of her bed, carried off all the jewelry and whatever 
they found in the room of value, as lawful plunder. The same 
day the king gave D'Ancre's staff of marechal to the baron de 
Vitry, and the others were all largely recompensed. The es- 
tates of the Concinis were granted to the due de Luynes. The 
queen-mother saw that her government was at an end, and she 
quietly resigned herself to her fate ; she was exiled from court, 
and sent to reside at Blois. 

The marechal's enemies at court had now had their triumph, 
and it remained only for the populace to take theirs. The body 
of the murdered favorite had been carried off by some of his fol- 
lowers, and was buried secretly and by night in the church of 
St. Germain I'Auxerrois. Next morning some traitor gave in- 
formation to the Parisians, and pointed out the place where he 
was interred. The populace rose tumultuously, hurried to the 
church, and, in spite of the remonstrances of the guardians of the 
church, who appealed to their respect for the dead, they forced 
their way in, broke up the floor, and tearing open the grave — it 
was said, with their finger-nails broke the coffin, and drew the 
body naked into the street. There they dragged it along fero- 
ciously through mud and dirt, till they reached the head of the 
Pont Neuf, where stood a gallows, which had been erected by 
the marechal's orders. They suspended the corpse on this gal- 
lows and let it hang there a short time, during which they cut 
off the nose and ears, and otherwise mutilated it, with horrible 
curses and vociferations, obliging everybody they met to join in 
shouting, vive le roi ! Then they took it down, and dragged it 
to the bronze statue of Henri IV., where it was passed through 
a fire, which had been hastily made for the purpose. Thence 
the mob, continually increasing in numbers and ferocity, dragged 
the body to the place before the hotel of the marechal, in the 
faubourg St. Germain, where they repeated their outrages, beat- 
ing the corpse with stones and sticks, amid the most horrible 
yells and screams. The same scene was repeated in front of 
the marechal's lodgings at the Louvre. It is said that the king, 
who was looking on from the balcony of the Louvre, encouraged 
the mob. After similar exhibitions in all the public places of 
Paris, the mutilated and disfigured body was at last carried to 
the place of the Greve, where a large fire was ready to receive 
it. The populace had become savage with drink, and before the 

21* 



246 SORCERY AND MAGIC, 

remains of the raarechal were committed to the flames, the flesh 
was torn in shreds from the bones in the struggles of individuals 
to obtain a portion to carry home and burn at their own houses. 
It was reported that people had obtained high prices for sheep's 
kidneys, under the pretence that they were the kidneys of the 
marechal de I'Ancre. 

The due de Luynes was now at the head of the government, 
and he determined to complete his work by the destruction of 
the marechale. On the 29th of April she was committed to. the 
Bastile, where she was treated with cruelty and insult. Her 
son, a mere child, Avas also thrown into prison, after having been 
stripped naked, and it is said he was left a whole day without 
clothes or food. When at length inquiries were made after him, 
so great was the inhumanity of the enemies of the late favorite, 
that some of the principal ladies of the court had the boy brought 
b'efore them to dance a sarabande, a dance in which he was said 
to excel. 

Meanwhile no means were neglected to vilify the name of the 
favorite, and prejudice people against his widow. Writers were 
employed to traduce them both ; numerous pamphlets were pub- 
lished, detailing the insolence of the marechal, and the sorceries 
of the marechale ; they were both made the subject of indecent 
raillery ; brutal and licentious songs and epigrams were com- 
posed,* in many of which the Parisians were invited to treat the 
widow as they had treated her husband. 

* The following is one of tbe more temperate of these effusions : — 

A LA MEMOIRE DE LA MARQUISE ET DtJ MARQUIS. 

L'on parle d'une marquise 
Et du coyon Florentin, 
Qui eut pour son entreprise 
Le I'oyaume de Pautin. 

S'elle estoit bonne sorciere, 
Ainsi que chacun croyoit, 
Au lieu d'estre prisonniere, 
Maintenant elle riroit. 

Mais sa finesse et ses charmes 
Clue deux monstres de I'enfer 
N'ont peu emposcher les armes 
Vedgeressa des coyoiis. 

Aussi n'est-il pas propice, 
Q,ue deux monstres de I'enfer 
S'opposent a la justice 
Tant des flames que du fer. 

t As in the following sample: — 

BUR LA SORCIERE DE CONCHINE. 

C'est assez, c'est assez, execrable Megere, 
Inferualle f urie, engeiice de vipere, 



THE MARECHALE ACCUSED OF SORCERY. 247 

The only accusations brougiit against the marechale d'Ancre at 
her trial, were those of being a witch, of holding communication 
with witches, and of having bewitched the queen-mother. The 
proofs were her familiar intercourse with Montalto, the Jew phy- 
sician who had accompanied Marie de Medicis from Italy, the 
exorcisms to which she had subjected herself as a defence against 
the witchcraft to which she believed herself exposed, and which 
were performed by Italian priests in the church of the Augustins, 
and the extraordinary influence she had always exerted over the 
queen It appears that at times, when suffering from dreadful 
pains in the head, the fancy or the superstitioa of her medical 
attendants had ordered the application of a newly-killed cock, or 
other bird, and this was now represented as a sacrifice to the de- 
mons. Her retired and in many cases strange manners were 
also cited against her. She often sat alone, strangely pensive 
and abstracted, and at such times it was her habit to continue 
rolling bits of wax between her fingers until they assumed the 
form of little bullets, which she threw into a cofler that lay by 
her. When her room was searched, after her arrest, a number 
of cofTers filled with these bullets of wax v/ere found, and these 
were taken for corroborative evidence that she was a sorcerer. 
It was looked upon as a circumstance of more importance that 
the astrological nativities of the queen and her children, carefully 
drawn up, were found in her possession ; these, which, in truth 
only showed the interest the favorite took in the fate of the royal 
family, were looked upon as instruments of sorcery. It was 
further reported abroad, to increase the popular hatred, that they 
found in her cabinet a quantity of books of magic, with virgin 
parchment, and a great number of magical characters.* 

On several occasions between the end of April and the begin- 
ning of July, the marechale was put to the torture, for the pur- 
pose of compelling her to confess that she had bewitched the 
queen-mother, but she bore it all with firmness. It is said, that 
when asked what were the charms she used to gain possession 
of the queen's affections, she replied proudly, that it was but the 
power of a weak mind over a strong one. The proofs against 
her were, however, pronounced to be sufficient to convict her of 

D'avoir desus la France vomy tant de veniii ! • 
Peuple, dress6s un feu, pour tjrusler la sorciere ; 
Jett^s la cendre au vent, escart^s la poussiere, 
GLu'nn luy fasse de mesme qu'on a faict au faquiii. 
* One of the scurrilous pamplilets published after the assassination of the mar6- 
chal d'Ancre, uuder the title of '■ La Medee de In France, depeinie en la personne 
de la marqii'he d' Aricre," tells us, " Ilsnnt ti'ouve dajis son cabinet quantite de livres 
de magie, du parchemia vieree, et grand nombre de caracteres." 



248 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

the crime of liigli treason, and she was condemned to be behead- 
ed, and then burnt, her house to be razed to the ground, and all 
her blood struck with incapacity. 

The marechale d'Ancre expected that the utmost severity she 
had to expect was banishment and confiscation of her property, 
and when she heard her sentence, she was struck with the ut- 
most astonishment, cried out repeatedly in her distress, " Oime 
povretta /" and declared in arrest of judgment that she was with 
child. This plea, however, she immediately retracted ; and 
when she was led to execution on the 8th of July, she submitted 
to her fate with firmness and resignation. The fury of the Pa- 
risian mob had itself abated, and the hated Italian favorite be- 
came on the scaffold an object of general commiseration. 



CHAPTER XXI. 



LOUIS GAUFRIDI. 



The belief in witchcraft was at this time turned to a new pur- 
pose by the Romish priesthood. They had long claimed exclu- 
sively for the church of Rome a transcendental avithority and 
power which they were fain, in their present contest with the 
protestant reformers, to support with pretended miracles ; and the 
belief which gained ground in the latter half of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, that people under the influence of witchcraft were possessed 
with demons in the same manner as the demoniacs of the New 
Testament, was too favorable to their plans to be neglected. 
Perhaps a great number of the catholic clergy believed consci- 
entiously in the reality of these' possessions, but in the more re- 
markable cases which have been chronicled, the patients were 
evidently persons tutored for the occasion ; and upon the evidence 
of such people'men of character were hurried to the gallows or 
the stake. 

There were many of these pretended cases of obsession in 
England, but they were generally discouraged by the church, 
and were in most cases detected and exposed. In 1575, a wo- 
man of Westwell, in Kent, named Mildred Nerrington, pretend- 
ed to be possessed, and accused a poor old woman of the neigh- 
borhood of having sent a devil into her. The affair went so far, 
that the vicar of the parish, with a neighboring clergyman, be- 



POPISH EXORCISERS. 249 

lieved that they had expelled the demon by their prayers, and 
printed a relation of it. The civil power in this case was more 
elfectual in establishing truth than the ecclesiastical, for the pre- 
tended demoniac confessed before two justices of the peace that 
it was an imposture, and she explained the way in which she 
had deceived the two clergymen. In 1579, a Welch girl, named 
Elizabeth Orton, pretended to fall into trances, and see visions, 
which were published with great solemnity by some Roman 
catholic priests ; but she also was detected, and made a public 
confession in Chester cathedral. Two years afterward, another 
case of pretended demoniacs, in which some Jesuits were impli- 
cated, was similarly exposed. In 1598, a protestant clergyman, 
named William Darrell, made a great noise by his pretended 
dispossessing of demoniacs in Nottinghamshire ; but his practice 
also ended in exposure. With a view to such cases, which were 
multiplying alarmingly, the convocation of the clergy, in the first 
year of King James, made a canon, " that no minister or minis- 
ters, without license and direction of the bishop, under his hand 
and seal obtained, attempt, upon any pretence whatsoever, either 
of possession or obsession, by fasting and prayer, to cast out any 
devil or devils, under pain of the imputation of imposture or coz- 
enage, or deposition from the ministry." 

Such cases were differently treated by the church in coun- 
tries where the Romish faith was established, and where, though 
many of the more honest and better informed of the popish clergy 
regarded them at least with suspicion, they were encouraged by 
the teaching and example of those Avho were looked upon as the 
greatest authorities. Solemn forms of invocation were composed 
for the purpose of exorcising the demons, and driving them away 
from their victims ; and these were as various and as supersti- 
tious as the charms of the magicians. The grand authority on 
this subject was an Italian ecclesiastic of the sixteenth century, 
named Geronimo Mengi, who published two collections of these 
exorcisms, which in the Latin edition are entitled Flagellum Dce- 
monum, the whip or scourge of demons, and Fastis Dmmonum, a 
club for the demons. In the introductory chapters of these books, 
the author de.scribes the manner in which the exorcist was to 
prepare for his important office, treats of the nature of the evil 
beings with whom he was to deal, and Avarns him against their 
cunning and tergiversation. Among other things, he discusses 
the question whether it be lawful to make use of insulting lan- 
guage to the demons, and he resoh-es it in the affirmative. An- 
other recommendation of this author shows the spirit of the 



250 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

whole — the demons were to be compelled to give some open 
testimony to the truth of the Romish faith. Sometimes, he says, 
the demons are very obstinate, but the exorciser vv^as to perse- 
vere day after day with great patience, and, above all, he was to 
endeavor to obtain possession of the instruments of sorcery, 
Avhich being burnt, would greatly wealten the power of the evil 
one. Finally, he directs t?iat the demoniacs should, if possible, 
be exorcised in an open church, before as large a congregation 
of people as possible. 

These doctrines became in France and other countries the 
groundwork for extraordinary cases of individual persecution, of 
which the one I am now going to relate was not the least re- 
markable. 

At Aix, in Provence, there was a* convent of Ursuline nuns. 
It was one of the poorest of the monastic orders of females, for 
which reason they were allowed several ways of gaining a live- 
lihood ; and they seem to have been easily made the tools of the 
priests. Among the Ursulines of Aix there was, in the year 1610, 
a young lady named Magdalen de la Palude, who appears then 
to have been a new convert. She was the daughter of the sieur 
de la Palude, a Proven(jal gentleman, who lived in the neighbor- 
hood of Marseilles. Magdalen had not been long among the sis- 
ters of St. Ursula before she was seized with trances, and these 
soon communicated themselves to one of the nuns named Louise 
Capeau, whom she had chosen to be her intimate friend, and 
subsequently to some of their companions, ^t was evident they 
were possessed, and the superior of the priest^proceeded to exor- 
cise them in a little chapel, but to no purpose, and for a full year 
the demons continued obstinate. 

Among the mountains, about three leagues from Aix, is the 
cave of La Sainte Baume, or " the holy cavern," in which Mary 
Magdalen, according to the popish tradition, was said to have 
passed her latter days, and which was now looked upon as a 
A^ery holy place of pilgrimage. A convent had been founded on 
the spot, dedicated to the two patron saints of Provence, St. 
Magdalen and St. Maximin, the prior of which, at the time these 
events occurred, was Sebastian Michaelis, who was of sufficient 
importance to hold the ofSce of an inquisitor of the faith. The 
superior of the priests of Aix, finding his own exorcisms of no 
avail, applied to the inquisitor Michaelis, by whose direction the 
two patients, Magdalen de la Palude and Louise Capeau, were 
carried to the Sainte Baume. The demons now became more 
tractable, and the exorciser learned that Magdalen was possessed 



THE SPIRITS EXORCISSD. 251 

by Beelzebub, and her companion by a no less potent imp, named. 
Verrine, who confessed that they had taken possession of the 
sufferers by order of Louis Gaufridi, who was the prince and 
commander of all the magicians in Spain, France, England, and 
other countries, as far as Turkey, and who had Lucifer for his 
demon. This Gaufridi was a native of the mountains of Prov- 
ence, born at Beauvezer les Colmaret ; he was now a priest at 
Marseilles, enjoying, it would appear, no very good reputation, 
especially on account of his intrigues with women, and he seems 
to have been an object of jealousy and ill-feeling among his fel- 
low-clergy. 

Sister Magdalen was induced to confess that when she was 
very young, Louis Gaufridi was a frequent visiter at her father's 
house in the country, and that one day when they were in the 
fields, he lured her away to a cavern at no great distance from 
her home. When they entered the cavern, she saw a great 
number of people, at which she was amazed, but her companion 
encouraged her and said, " These are our friends, you must be 
marked like them." She poor girl was in such astonishment 
that she made no resistance, but submitted to be marked and 
abused, and then she returned home, telling nobody, not even her 
father or mother, what had occurred. After this she was fre- 
quently carried to the meeting of the witches, of whom she was 
made princess, as Gaufridi was their prince. Although she still 
remained in her father's house, her intercourse with Gaufridi 
continued, until she suddenly took a fancy to enter the convent 
of the nuns of St. Ursula. When she consulted Gaufridi on this 
step, he earnestly dissuaded her from it, urged her to marry, and 
promised to find her a rich and handsome husband ; but when he 
saw that she was fixed in her determination, he became angry, 
and threatened that, if she became a nun, his punishment should 
be not only upon her, but upon all the sisterhood, and the conse- 
quence was the visitation under which they were now suffering. 
Such was the statement made by Magdalen de la Palude to the 
inquisitor of the Sainte Baume. 

The two nuns arrived at the Sainte Baume on the 27th of 
November, 1610, and the prior Michaelis seems to have taken a 
pleasure in exercising the office of exorcist, for he continued his 
examinations almost daily till the month of April following. On 
their first arrival at the convent of the Holy Cave, the demons 
were extremely violent, and, irritated by the prior's exorcisms, 
they threw their victims into violent contortions, raised them up 
in the church (the place of exorcising), and attempted to carry 



252 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

them out by an opening over the choir, but they were prevented. 
In the course of a day or two the exorcisms began to produce 
their effect, and on the 7th 0/ December, Verrine, who was the 
weaker demon, and had possession of Sister Louise, was com- 
pelled to talk. He said that Louise was possessed by three dev- 
ils, himself and two others, named Gresil and Sonneillon. Next 
day Verrine gave a long account of the beauty, merits, and glory 
of the Virgin Mary. Meanwhile Beelzebub, who possessed Sister 
Magdalen, was enraged at the informations given by his fellow- 
demon, and during his discourse on the merits of the Virgin 
Mary, he began to bellow like a mad bull, turning his victim's 
head and eyes in dreadful contortions, and taking off one of her 
shoes, threw it at Verrine and struck Sister Louise on the head. 
On the 9th of December, the demon Verrine accused Sister Mag- 
dalen of being a witch, and exhorted her to repentance, but he said 
that Sister Louise was innocent. Beelzebub was again turbulent, 
and threatened Verrine with punishment, but the latter treated 
his menaces with contempt ; he said he owed obedience to Beel- 
zebub when they were in hell together, but that under circum- 
stances like the present he was his equal. On the lOlh, Ver- 
rine entered into details relating to the punishments of the other 
world, and Beelzebub was less unruly, though he tossed his victim, 
Sister Magdalen, from one side of the church to the other, saying 
that was the way they tossed about the souls of sinners in the 
regions below. During all these strange proceedings, the church 
was crowded with pilgrims, who went away " much edified." 

It was decided on the 12th of December that in future, while 
one priest exorcised and questioned the demons, another should 
commit their answers to writing. These depositions were col- 
lected and printed seriously by the exerciser Sebastian Michae- 
lis, whose book made a great sensatioi\, and went through several 
editions. It forms a sort of compendium of transcendental divin- 
ity ; for the exerciser directed his examinations to the express 
object of obtaining " authentic" information on different points 
respecting which doubts might exist in the minds of Christians. 
Among other things the demons told them that Antichrist was 
born ; and when questioned as to the condition of Solomon and 
Nebuchadnezzar, whether Henri IV. (then lately dead) was 
saved, and on other similar matters, they gave replies which 
were highly satisfactory to all zealous catholics. On one occa- 
sion Beelzebub spoke with great bitterness against the art of 
printing, cursing the inventors of it, those who exercised it, and 
the doctors who gave their approbation to the books ! These 



PROCEEDINGS AGAINST GAUFEIDI. 253 

exorcisms, as I have stated above, v^ere continued till the month 
of April, 1611 ; the demons appear to have suffered severely 
under the compulsion by which such confessions were extorted, 
and from time to time they became rebellious, and howled and 
shouted, invoking other demons to their assistance ! 

The priests who conducted this affair seem almost to have lost 
sight of Louis Gaufridi, in their anxiety to collect these important 
evidences of the true faith. It was not till toward the close of 
Avinter that the reputed wizard was again thought of. A warrant 
"was then obtained against him, and he was taken into custody, 
and confined in the prison of the Conciergerie at Marseilles. On 
the 5th of March he was for the first time confronted with Sister 
Magdalen, but without producing the result anticipated by his 
persecutors. Little information is given as to the subsequent 
proceedings against him, but he appears to have been treated 
with great severity, and to have persevered in asserting his in- 
nocence. Sister Magdalen, or rather the demon within her, 
gave information of certain marks on his body which had been 
placed there by the evil one, and on search they were found ex- 
actly as described. It is not to be wondered at, if, after the in- 
tercourse which had existed between them. Sister Magdalen 
were able to give such information. Still Gaufridi continued un- 
shaken, and he made no confession, until at length, on Easter 
eve, the 26th of March, 1611, a full avowal of his guilt was 
drawn from him, we are not told through what means, by two 
capuchins of the convent of Aix, to which place he had been 
transferred for his trial. At the beginning of April, another wit- 
ness, the demoiselle Victoire de Courbier, came forward to de- 
pose that she had been bewitched by the renegade priest, who 
had obtained her love by his charms, and he made no objection 
to their adding this new incident to his confession. 

Gaufridi acknowledged the truth of all that had been said by 
Sister Magdalen or by her demon. He said that an uncle, who 
had died many years ago, had left him his books, and that one 
day, about five or six years before his arrest on this accusation, 
he was looking them over, when he found among them a volume 
of magic, in which were some writings in French verse, accom- 
panied with strange characters. His curiosity was excited, and 
he began to read it, when to his great astonishment and conster- 
nation, the demon appeared in a human form, and said to him, 
" What do you desire of me, for it is you who have called me ?" 
Gaufridi was young, and easily tempted, and when he had re- 
covered from his surprise, and was reassured by the manner 

22 



25i SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

and conversation of his visiter, he repaed to his offer, " If you 
have power to give me what I desire, .. ask for two things ; first, 
that I shall prevail with all the women I like ; secondly, that 1 
shall be esteemed and honored above all the priests of this coun- 
try, and enjoy the respect of men o.^ :vealth and honor." We 
may see perhaps through these wishes the reason why Gaufridi 
was persecuted by the rest of the cleigy. The demon promised 
to grant him his desires, on condition that he would give up to 
him entirely his " body, soul, and works ;" to which Gaufridi 
agreed, except only from the latter the odrainistration of the holy 
sacrament, to which he was bound by his vocation as a priest of 
the church. 

From this time Louis Gaufridi felt ??. extreme pleasure in read- 
ing the magical book, and it always had the effect of bringing the 
demon to attend upon him. At the end of two or three days the 
agreement was arranged and completed and, it having been fairly 
written on parchment, the priest signed it with his blood. The 
tempter told him that, whenever he br,iathed on maid or woman, 
provided his breath reached their nos'rils, they would immedi- 
ately become desperately in love with him. He soon made a 
trial of the demon's gift, and used it sc copiously, that he became 
in a short time a general object of attraction to the women of the 
district. He said that he often amused himself with exciting 
their passions, when he had no intent-cn of requiting them, and 
he declared that he had already made more than a thousand 
victims. 

At length he took an extraordinary fancy to the young Mag- 
dalen de la Palude ; but he found her difficult of approach on 
account of the watchfulness of her moUior, and he only overcame 
the difficulty by breathing on the mother before he seduced the 
daughter. He thus gained his purpose, took the girl to the cave 
in the manner she had already descrbad, and became so much 
attached to her that he often repeated his charm on her to make 
her more devoted in her love. Three Jays after their first visit 
to the cave, he gave her a familiar Baried Esmodes. Finding 
her now perfectly devoted to his will, he determined to marry 
her to Beelzebub, the prince of the demons, and she readily 
agreed to his proposal. He immed'ately called the demon 
prince, who appeared in the form of a handsome gentleman ; 
and she then renounced her baptism and Christianity, signed 
the agreement with her blood, and received the demon's mark. 
When the book of magic and the various agreements, which 
Gaufridi said he had preserved, were nought for, they were not 



MAGDALEN DE LA PALUDE. 255 

forthcoming; but he got over this difficulty by stating that he 
had burnt the one, when under fear of arrest, and that the evil 
one had carried away the others. He declared further, that he 
had had intercourse with Sister Magdalen since she was at the 
Samte Baume ; that he had often been at sabbaths at the Baume 
de Rolland, the Baume de Loubieres, and other places in the 
mountains about, and that two or three times he had wished that 
these meetings should be held at the Sainte Baume. Once the 
devil had sent him to fetch Sister Magdalen thence, and he de- 
clared that he had dragged her from one place to another throuoh 
all the woods around. '^ 

The priest gave an account of the sabbaths, at which he was 
a regular attendant. When he was ready to go — it was usually 
at night— he either went to the open window of his chamber, or 
left the chamber, locking the door, and proceeded into the open 
air. There Lucifer made his appearance, and took him in an 
instant to their place of meeting, where the orgies of the witches 
and sorcerers lasted usually from three to four hours. Gaufridi 
divided the victims of the evil one into three classes, — the 
masques (perhaps the novices), the sorcerers, and the magicians. 
On arriving at the meeting, they all worshipped the demon, ac- 
cording to their several ranks, the masques falling flat on their 
faces, the sorcerers kneeling with their heads and bodies hum- 
bly bowed down, and the magicians, who stood highest in im- 
portance, only kneeling. After this, they all went through the 
formality of denying God and the saints. Then they had a dia- 
bolical service in burlesque of that of the church, at which the 
evil one served as priest in a violet chasuble ; the elevation of 
the demon hoste was announced by a wooden bell, and the sac- 
rament itself was made of unleaven bread. The scenes w^iich 
followed resembled those of other witch-meetings. Gaufridi ac- 
knowledged that he took Magdalen thither, and that he made 
her swallow magical " characters," that were to increase her 
love to him ; yet he proved unfaithful to her at these sabbaths 
with a multitude of persons, and among the rest with " a princess 
of Friesland." The unhappy sorcerer confessed, among other 
things, that his demon was his constant companion, though o'en- 
eraliy invisible to all but himself, and that he only left him when 
he entered the church of the capuchins to perform his religious 
duties, and then he waited for him outside the church-door.'^ 

Gaufridi was tried before the court of parliament of Provence, 
at Aix. His confession, the declarations of the demons, the 
marks on his body, and other circumstances, left him no hope 



256 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

of mercy ; judgment was given against him on the last day of 
April, and. the same day it was put in execution. He was burnt 
alive. 

All true catholics had derived so much edification from the 
declarations of the demons of Aix, that cases of possession be- 
came more frequent, especially among the nuns. Among the 
more remarkable cases, we may merely cite those of the nuns 
of Louviers, in 1643, and of the rmns of Aussonne, in 1662. I 
will, however, content myself with one more narrative of this 
class, which is perhaps the most extraordinary of them all. We 
are left to guess at the reasons for the persecution of Louis Gau- 
fridi, but our next chapter will detail a history of which the mo- 
tives were more apparent. 



CHAPTER XXH. 

THE URSULINES OF LOUDUN. 



Soon after the period of the persecution of Louis Gaufridi, 
there was in the town of Loudun in the ancient province of An- 
jou a priest named Urbain Grandier, a canon of the church there, 
and a man who was as remarkable for his learning and talent as 
for his handsome person and courtly manners. He was born 
toward the end of the sixteenth century at Bouvere near Sable, 
at which latter place his father, Pierre Grandier, exercised the 
profession of a notary, and his uncle, Claude Grandier, was, 
like himself, a priest. Urbain Grandier had studied in the col- 
lege of the Jesuits at Bordeaux, and distinguished himself so 
much by his attainments and by his eloquence that he became 
very popular at Loudun, where he obtained two benefices as a 
preacher. This excited the jealousy and hatred of his brothei 
clergy, whom his proud and resentful spirit hindered him from 
conciliating. He seems to have given them some hold upon 
him by certain irregularities in his life, especially by his famili- 
arities with the other sex, which were a matter of scandal in the 
town. Loudun, moreover, contained a large population of prot- 
estants, and Urbain Grandier perhaps had a leaning toward 
them. 

Between the year 1620 and 1629, Urbain Grandier had had 
several serious quarrels and some lawsuits with the clergy of 



THE URSULINES OF LOUDUN. 257 

Loudun. A priest named Mounier had published libels upon 
him, and Urbain prosecuted and obtained a judgment against 
him, and exacted the full penalty with unfeeling rigor. He had 
gained an action against another priest named Mignon, a canon 
of the church of St. Croix, in a matter relating to a house which 
the latter claimed, and he had made Mignon his personal- enemy 
by the offensive manner in which he exulted in his defeat. By 
such proceedings as these, and by his real or reputed amours, 
he had gained many enemies. In 1629, he was accused before 
the court of the bishop of Poitiers of scandalous intrigues, and 
even of having secretly introduced women into his church for 
improper purposes, and he was condemned by the official to be 
ejected from all his benefices. But some irregularity having 
been discovered in the proceedings, Urbain appealed, and ob- 
tained a decree of parliament, referring the case to the presidial 
of Poitiers, and he was acquitted of the charg-es brought against 
him, which his accusers were compelled to retract. This judg- 
ment was delivered on the 25th of May, 1631. It increased the 
exasperation of his enemies to such a degree, that the archbishop 
of Bordeaux, as Urbain's friend, advised him to quit Loudun, and 
establish himself in some other place out of the way of his per- 
secutors. But the angry priest was too proud and resentful to 
listen to counsel like this. 

In the year 1626, a small convent of Ursuline nuns had been 
established at Loudun, and being veiy poor, they rented a pri- 
vate house, and were allowed to support themselves by taking 
as boarders a few young ladies whom they educated. Their 
first confessor or " director of conscience," was a priest named 
Mussaut, who died soon after the acquittal of Urbain Grandier 
by the presidial of Poitiers. Urbain, rather imprudently, be- 
came a candidate for Mussaut's place, but was rejected, it was 
afterward said, on account of his scandalous character. The 
office of director of conscience to the Ursulines was given to his 
old enemy Mignon. This aff'air seems to have caused a revival 
of animosities which might otherwise have sunk into oblivion. 

Meanwhile the young scholars of the convent appear to have 
felt dull in the company of their teachers, and they determined 
to amuse themselves with frightening them. For this purpose 
they left their beds by. night, made dreadful noises about the 
house, and took advantage of secret passages and peculiarities 
they had discovered in the building to play a variety of pranks, 
which they laid to the charge of the ghost of the late spiritual 
director, Father Mussaut. The nuns communicated their terrors 

22* 



258 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

to Mussaut's successor, who soon suspected the intrigue ; he 
saw to what advantage it might be turned, and obtained the con- 
fidence of the girls who were carrying it on. He not only en- 
couraged them to proceed, but he soon brought tlie nuns them- 
selves to join in his plans. 

Mignon now proceeded more systematically in instructing his 
patients in the parts they were to act, and taught them to coun- 
terfeit all the strange postures and contortions of one supposed 
to be possessed. He gained the nuns to his purposes, not only 
-by holding out to them the hope of enriching and glorifying 
their order, but by telling them that they would be the means of 
confounding and perhaps converting the numerous heretics in 
and about the town oi Loudun, and he assured them that Urbain 
Grandier was himself a secret heretic. As far as we can judge, 
the motive which had most weight with the nuns was the pros- 
pect of enriching themselves by this " pious fraud," and the su- 
perior of the convent entered warmly into the design. Having 
prepared everything for his purpose, Mignon sent for a bigoted 
priest of the neighborhood of Loudun, named Pierre Barre, a 
man who had assumed the character of a saint, to support which 
he performed a variety of extravagancies. With the assistance 
of this man, who was rejoiced at the opportunity of exhibiting 
the effects of his own holiness, Mignon began by exorcising the 
superior and two of her nuns, and they carried on their pro- 
ceedings in great secret for two or three days. They then en- 
tered in;o communication with another priest, who bore a very 
indifferent character, and made him their messenger to two 
magistrates, whom they invited to witness the exorcising of two 
nutis of the convent of the Ursulines possessed, as they said, by 
evil spirits. The first exhibition before the magistrates took 
place on the 11th of October, 1632. Before the proceedings 
began, Mignon informed the magistrates, that the nuns had been 
troubled for some time with a visitation of spectral appearances, 
which had ended in some of them being possessed with demons. 
He said that the superior of the nuns was possessed by the grand 
demon Astaroth, and that one of the nuns was in the possession 
of another devil whose name was Sabulon ; and, although the 
nuns themselves, as he assured the magistrates, were totally 
ignorant of the learned languages, the demons knew all lan- 
guages, and preferred making use of those which were no 
longer spoken. They were then ushered into a chamber where 
the superior lay in bed, and Mignon and his fellow exorcist be- 
gan their operations. When the patient first saw the priests 



THE SPIRITS TALK LATIN. 259 

and their companions, she appeared to be seized with dreadful 
spasms and screamed fearfully ; but under the hands of the ex- 
orcists she became calmer, and Mignon proceeded to interrogate 
her spirit in Latin. To his first question, " Propter quam caus- 
am ingressus es in corpus hvjus virginis (for what cause did 
you enter the body of this virgin) ?" Astaroth answered with . 
the utmost docility, " Causa anirnositalis (from animosity)." 
" Per quod pactum (by what pact) ?" said Mignon. " Per 
flares (by flowers)," replied the demon. — " Quales (what flow- 
ers) ?" asked the priest. " i^oi-a^," was the reply. — " Quis 
misit (who sent them) V " Urhanus. — "" Die cognomen (tell 
us his surname) 1" To this demand the demon replied with the 
utmost readiness, " Grandier." — Determined to possess all the 
particulars, the exorcist continued, " Die qualitatem (tell us his 
profession) V " Sacerdos (a priest)," said the spirit. — " Cujus 
ecclesion (of what church) ?" " Sancti Petri (of St. Peter's)." 
Then said the priest, " Qucs persona attulit flores (what person 
brought the flowers) ?" to which the instant reply was, " Diabo- 
lica(n, demon)." 

With this, the fit ended, and of course the examination could 
be carried on no longer. Mignon took the magistrates aside, 
and discoursed with them on the extraordinary scene they had 
witnessed, pointing out to them its resemblance to the aff"air of 
Louis Gaufridi which had occurred twenty years before. The 
Romish clergy in general seemed inclined to believe implicitly 
in the possession, and the capuchins showed a particular ani- 
mosity against Grandier. The laity were astonished at these 
extraordinary revelations, and it is not to be wondered at if a 
great portion of them were led by the priests, and thus easily 
prejudiced against the accused. The calling in of the magis- 
trates had givbn the affair more importance; the first two in- 
vited had probably been selected as those most likely to be im- 
posed upon by priestcraft. They were admitted to another 
experiment next day (the 12th of October), and after the demon 
who possessed the superior of the convent had been duly exor- 
cised, he repeated the charges against Grandier, adding that he 
was not only'a priest, but magus (a magician). On this occa- 
sion the guilty roses were asked for, and a bunch of those flow- 
ers were produced and burnt before the company, but to the 
disappointment of them all, they did not, as was expected, emit 
a noxious odor under the action of the fire. The principal civil 
officers of the municipality now interfered, and on the 13th of 
October the bailli of the town, with the lieutenant civil, the 



260 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

lieutenant criminal, the procureiir du roi, the lieutenant a la pre- 
vote, and other officers, went together to the convent of the Ur- 
sulines. It would appear that some of these municipal officers 
were protestants, and the bailli, especially, was known as a man 
of good sense and justice. When they arrived at the house 
occupied by the nuns, they were shown into a waiting-room, 
where they were left a considerable time, until Mignon conde- 
scended to make his appearance, and inform them that the de- 
mon that morning had refused to answer except in private, that 
the examination had been a very extraordinary one, and that he 
would give them a report of it in writing. 

Urbain Grandier professed to despise the intrigues of his en- 
emies, but he could not help feeling alarmed at the formidable 
league which had been raised against him. He determined first 
to apply for protection to the spiritual power, and he hurried to 
lay his complaint before the bishop of Poitiers. This prelate, 
however, as we have seen before, was not friendly to Grandier, 
who could not obtain a personal audience, but was referred back 
to the civil authorities for redress. On his return to Loudun, 
Grandier went to the civil court, and presented a formal charge 
of conspiracy against the priest Mignon ; and on the 28th of 
October, the bailli issued a public order of the court against the 
calumnies of the priests. , Mignon protested earnestly against 
this proceeding, and the whole town became violently agitated 
by the dispute between the priests and the civil authorities. 
The bailli followed up his decree by taking a decided part 
against the nuns, and he gave Grandier. warning of every new 
step which they took. The priests, however, now set the civil 
power at defiance, and, preparing to act under the authority of 
the bishop of Poitiers, they contiuued their exorcisms of the 
nuns, and, having collected together a number of the least rep- 
utable medical practitioners of the place, men they knew were 
willing from credulity or knavery to be their tools, they obtained 
their signature to a statement of the truth of the possession. Up- 
on this the bailli publicly inhibited the priests from exorcising 
or further proceeding in this case, but they again refused to ac- 
knowledge his jurisdiction. 

They accordingly went on exorcising more openly and boldly 
than ever. Another nun was now found to be possessed, and 
her demon confessed that he was Asmodeus, and that he had 
five companions in the possession of this single victim. He 
also declared that Urbain Grandier was the magician who had 
sent them. This occurred on the 24th of November ; on the 



THE BISHOP OF POITIERS. 261 

25th, the ciA'il officers, who were present, insisted on trying the 
pretended powers of the demons to speak all languages, and the 
bailli asked the patient what was the Hebrew word signifying 
water. She held down her head and muttered something, 
which one of the witnesses who stood A'ery near her declared 
was a mere refusal in French to answer. But one of the priests, 
who was suggesting to her, insisted that she said zaquaq, which 
he declared meant in Hebrew aquam ejfudi ! On a previous 
occasion they had risked an exposure by making the demon 
speak bad Latin.* They now, therefore, began to be more cau- 
tious, and carried on their examination of the demons in a more 
secret manner. At the same time they tried to gain the bailli 
over, but in vain. The confessions of the demons still turned 
mainly upon the delinquencies of Grandier, but they began also 
to talk against the Huguenots, provoked no doubt by the incre- 
dulity of the civil magistrates. As the latter had exposed some 
of their tricks, and had given them considerable embarrassment, 
the nuns were now made to say in their fits that they would no 
longer give any answers in the presence of the baiiji or other 
municipal officers. 

The priests now made their appeal to the bishop of Poitiers, 
who at last openly espoused their cause, and on the 28th of No- 
vember he appointed two commissioners, the deans of the canons 
of Champigni, and of the canons of Thouars, to examine into this 
strange affair. With their countenance and assistance the exor- 
cisms commenced anew, and when, on the 1st of December, the 
bailli went to the convent, and insisted upon being admitted to the 
-examination, and upon being permitted to put questions to the nuns 
when exorcised, he was refused by Barre, who now acted as chief 
exorcist. The bailli then formally forbade him to put any questions 
to the pretended demons tending to defame individuals ; but Barre 
merely replied that it was his intention to use his own discretion 
in this respect. The priests had now everything at their own will, 
and they were sanguine of success, when their plot was deranged 
by the unexpected announcement that the archbishop of Bordeaux 
was on his way to Loudun. On several occasions the priests 
had declared, to explain some temporary intermission of the fits, 
that they had succeeded in driving away the demons, but that 
they had subsequently been sent back by the magician. When 
news came of the approach of the archbishop, they disappeared 
entirely, and the nuns became quiet and tranquil. Some pru- 

* In allusion to their bad Latin, and to the classes in the schools, a wit of the 
day said, " Que les diable de Loudun n'avoient etudie quejusqu'en troisime." 



262 SORCEUY AND MAGIC. 

dent directions given by the archbishop seem to have put a stop 
to further proceedings, and even Mignon and Barre let the mat- 
ter drop, so that little more was heard of it. 

The Ursulines were now the sufferers. They fell into gene- 
ral discredit; people took away their daughters,* and they fell 
into distress. They laid the blame of their sufferings on their 
director Mignon, who had led them into the expectation of de- 
riving great profit from their imposture. 

Before the embers of this flame were quite extinct, an unex-, 
pected circumstance rekindled them. Among the pamphlets 
Avhich had appeared against Cardinal Richelieu, who then ruled 
the destinies of France, was a very bitter satire, entitled, in allu- 
sion to some low intrigue of the cardinals connected with this 
town, La Cordonniere de Loudun. M. de Laubardemont, a crea- 
ture of the cardinal, who at this time held the office of master of 
the requests, was sent to Loudun, in 1633, to direct the demoli- 
tion of the castle of that place. Mignon and his fellow-plotters 
immediately obtained an introduction to this minister, and they 
not only recounted to him the affair of the nuns, in a manner very 
disadvantageous to Urbain Grandier and his friends, but they 
persuaded him that Urbain was the author of the satire just men- 
tioned. Laubardemont returned to Paris, and communicated 
what he had heard to the cardinal, who seldom spared the au- 
thors of personal attacks on himself when they were in his pow- 
er, and who is said to have been urged on to sacrifice the cure 
of Loudun by his confidential adviser, the celebrated pere Joseph. 
The result was, that Laubardemont returned to Loudun, commis- 
sioned by the king to inquire into the possession of the nuns, 
and into the charges against Grandier. He arrived at Ijoudun 
with this commission on the 6th of December, 1633. 

The case nojv assumed a much more serious countenance. 
The demons returned to the sisters with redoubled fury, and 
with an increase of numbers, and nearly all the nuns were at- 
tacked by them. Mignon and his fellovz-priest had already got 
up an exhibition of exorcism for Laubardemont before that func- 
tionary's departure for Paris, and he brought back with him a 
writ for the apprehension of Grandier, in which were blazoned 
forth all the crimes which had ever been imputed, rightly or 
wrongly, to that individual. Upon this he was thrown into pris- 
on, and his house searched for magical books, which were not 

* Tallemant des R6aux, wlio has preserved so many anecdotes of this period, 
tells us that Le Couldrny Montpensier, wlio had two daughters boarding with these 
nuns, immediately took them away, and had them well whipped, which he found 
an efficacious method of driving out the demons. 



PERSECUTION OF URBAIN GRANDIER 263 

found. Two only proofs against him, considered of any import- 
ance, were discovered among his papers, some French verses, 
which. are characterized in the proces verbal as being sales et irn- 
p'ldiqiies — a somewhat strange accusation in that licentious age, 
but they perhaps served to corroborate the suspicion that Gran- 
dier was the author of the libel on the cardinal — and a book 
which he had written, but never published, against the celibacy 
of the clergy. At the beginning of the year a series of examina- 
tions were taken, and being committed to writing and duly at- 
tested, Laubardemont carried them to Paris to lay them before 
the minister. He then received a new commission from the king 
to act as supreme judge of this cause, independent of all other 
jurisdiction whatever ; and he returned to Loudun with this ex- 
tensive power on the 9th of April, 1634. 

Laubardemont began by selecting as judges a certain number 
of persons from the local magistracy who were most likely to be 
devoted to his will, and such ph}^sicians and others were cho- 
sen to assist in the examinations as were known to bear enmity 
to the accused. The numerous victims of the pretended posses- 
sion were now distributed into two bands, for the convenience 
of the exorcists. On the 23d of April the superior of the nuns 
declared that the demons who possessed her had entered her in 
the forms of a cat, a dog, a stag, and a goat. On the 24th, she 
declared the Grandier had the demon's marks on his body. On 
the authority of this statement, next day a surgeon, selected as 
being the bitterest of his enemies, was sent to Grandier in his 
prison to search for his marks, and the miserable victim was 
stripped and treated with extreme inhumanity. He ended by 
discovering, as he pretended, five marks, or insensible spots. 
The demons were not always very accurate in the information 
they gave to the exorcists. When questioned as to Grandier's 
books of magic, they indicated a certain demoiselle to whom he 
had intrusted them before his arrest, and in whose house they 
said that the books would be found. Laubardemont and others 
went immediately to the house indicated, which they examined 
from top to bottom, but they found no books of the description of 
those of which they were in search. They returned, and scold- 
ed the demons for their false information. The latter pretended 
that a niece of the demoiselle had carried them away after the in- 
formation had been given. They then went to the niece, but 
they found that she was at church, and that she had been so oc- 
cupied all day that it was impossible she could have acted as the 
demons stated. But the exorcists were not discouraged by a few 



2G4 SORCERY AND MAGIC5. 

slips like tliese, and they were especially active in their exami- 
nations at the beginning of the month of JVtay. Some new de- 
mons then appeared on the scene, vmder the names of Eazas, 
Cerberus, Beherit, &c. Other statements of the demons were 
found to be false, and the conspirators had much difficulty in con- 
cealing some of the tricks they employed. But all these diffi- 
culties were passed OA'er as matters of little moment. 

The examinations were now exhibited publicly in the church, 
and a crowd of people, both catholics and Huguenots, were al- 
ways present. The matter had already created so much sensa- 
tion throughout France, that many people of quality came from 
Paris and other parts, so that all the hostelries in the town were 
filled with visiters. Among the rest was Quillet, the court poet, 
who fell into temporary disgrace by his imprudence on this occa- 
sion. At one of the exhibitions, Satan, speaking from the mouth 
of one of the sisters, threatened that he would toss up to the ceil- 
ing of the church any one who should dare to deny the posses- 
sion of the nuns. Quillet took him on his word, and was not 
tossed to the ceiling, but he provoked so much the anger of Lau- 
bardemont, that he is said to have found it advisable to make a 
journey to Rome. On another occasion the devil boasted that 
he would take the protestant minister of Loudun in his pulpit 
and carry him up to the top of the church-steeple, but he did not 
put his threat in execution. This same protestant minister was 
present at one of the examinations, when the priests, who were 
administering the consecrated host, told him contemptuously, to 
show their superiority over the Huguenots, that he dared not put 
his fingers into the mouths of the nuns as they did. He is said 
to have replied, that " he had no familiarity with the devil, and 
would not presume to play with him." The priests made the 
nuns utter a great mass of nonsense, and much that was profane 
and indecent. They caused them to say many things irreverent 
even to those who conducted the prosecution, which was con- 
sidered as proving how little they were influenced by them. One 
day the devil, by the mouth of one of the sisters, closed the ex- 
amination by declaring, " M. de Laubardemont est cocuP In the 
evening, as usual, Laubardemont took the written report, wrote 
under these words as a matter of course, " Ce que fatteste etre 
vrai" and signed it with his name. When the depositions Were 
sent to Paris, this circumstance was the source of no little amuse- 
ment at court. 

As the trial went on, doubts and ridicule began to be thrown 
upon it, which alarmed the commissioners, and it was resolved 



CONDEMNATION OF GRANDIER. 265 

to hasten the proceedings. Every precaution was taken to se- 
cure the condemnation of Grandier. His brother, an advocate 
of parliament, was accused of sorcery and placed under arrest, 
that he might not be capable of appealing. Every circumstance 
that told in favor of the accused was carefully suppressed, while 
whatever could be turned against hira was magnified into undue 
importance. Those who expressed any doubts were threatened 
with prosecution ; and the bishop of Poitiers now came forward 
again, and not only gave the prosecution the full advantage of his 
ecclesiastical authority, but he caused placards to be exhibited 
about the town forbidding any one to speak disrespectfully of the 
nuns. This at once shut the mouths of all Grandier's friends. 

His enemies had, however, another embarrassing circumstance 
to contend with. Some of the actors appear to have become 
ashamed of their parts, and to have been surprised with scruples 
of conscience. At the beginning of July, Sister Clara declared 
before the multitude assembled in the church, that all her confes- 
sions for some months past had been mere falsehood and impos- 
ture, which had been put into her mouth by Mignon and the 
priests, and she rushed from the church and endeavored to make 
her escape ; but she was seized and brought back. This, how- 
ever, did not hinder another nun. Sister Agnes, from following 
her example, and she made a similar declaration. The commis- 
sioner immediately adopted measures for hindering the recur- 
rence of such accidents, and the priests declared that it was only 
one of the demon's vagaries, and that the unruly patients were 
at that moment under his influence. They carried their meas- 
ures of intimidation so far, that they accused not only a sister of 
Grandier, but the wife of the bailli of Loudun, of being witches, 
intending thus at one blow to strike fear into his friends and re- 
lations. And they declared openly that the attempt to throw dis- 
credit on the proceedings was a mere trick of the Huguenots, 
who were afraid that the miracles performed by the priests on. 
this occasion would throw discredit upon them. 

Thus, overruling every form of law and justice, did the cure^s 
enemies hurry on their object. As soon as it was known that 
the all-powerful cardinal was resolved on the destruction of the 
victim, few were bold enough to stand up in his defence. On 
the 18th of August, 1634, the judges assembled in the convent 
of the Carmelites, and on the faith of evidence testified by Asta- 
roth, the chief of the devils, and a host of other demons, they 
pronounced judgment on Urbain Grandier, convicted of magic 
and sorcery, to the effect that he should perform penance before 

23 



266 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

the public, and that then he should be conducted to the stake, 
and burnt alive along with his magical covenants and characters 
(these were probably invented), and with his manuscript treatise 
on the celibacy of the clergy.* The sentence was put in execu- 
tion the same day. 

Thus perished another victim of superstition, adopted as the 
instrument of personal revenge. The process of the cure of 
Loudun made an extraordinary noise, the bigoted priests holding 
it up as a miraculous proof of the truth and efficacy of the Romish 
faith, while the protestants decried it loudly as an infamous im- 
posture. Even in England it excited considerable interest. It 
gave rise to many publications in France, where also the evi- 
dence was analyzed, and its weakness exposed, and the whole 
affair soon fell into discredit. Some years afterward, the mate- 
rials of this tragic story were collected together and arranged in 
a small volume printed at Amsterdam, in 1693, under the title of 
the Histoire des Diables de Loudun. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES. 



There was something extraordinary in the sudden prevalence 
of sorcery during the years 1610, 1611, and 1612, through most 
of the countries of western Europe. It was in the last of these 
years that occurred one of the most romantic, if not one of the 
most remarkable, cases of witchcraft in England. 

One of the wildest districts in Lancashire, even at the present 
day, is that known as the forest of Pendle, on the borders of 
Yorkshire. Above it rises the dark and lofty mountain known 
as Pendle hill, from the declivity of which the forest extended 
over a descent of about five miles to a barren and dreary tract 
called the water of Pendle. The view from the summit of the 
hill was grand and extensive, and near at hand beneath lay the 
splendid remains of the abbey of Whalley. The tract included 
under the name of the forest was barren and desolate, thinly in- 
habited, and its population very rude and uncultivated. On a 

" The original depositions, witli the autograph signatures of the demons (!), are 
still preserved among the manuscripts in the national library in Paris. The signa- 
tures are strange scrawls, evidently written by trembling hands guided by others. 



THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES, 267 

brow of the descent from Pendle hill, at a considerable distance 
from any other habitation, stood a solitary and deserted building 
of some antiquity, no doubt in ruins, known popularly as the 
iVIalkin tower. It was inhabited at the time of which we are 
speaking by an old woman, whose real name was Elizabeth 
Southernes, but who was better known in the neighborhood by 
that of Old Demdike. She was at this time about eighty years 
of age, and exhibited all the characteristics of a confirmed witch 
in their most exaggerated forms. She had a son named Christo- 
pher, and a daughter named Elizabeth, who married a laborer of 
the Pendle district, named John Device. The Devices had three 
children, James, Alizon, and Jennet, the latter being, in 1612, 
nine years of age. It is one of the doctrines of sorcery, that 
the descendants of a witch follow, from a sort of inevitable ne- 
cessity, the same profession, and all the members of this family 
then living, through the three generations, bore the same evil 
reputation. 

They were not, however, alone in their dealings with the 
evil one, for the district of Pendle was at this time little better 
famed in the north of England than the territory of Labourd in 
France. There was another family which held a high rank 
among the witches of Pendle, the principal member of which 
was Anne Whittle, who went by the popular name of Old Chat- 
tox, and was of the same age as Old Demdike ; she had an only 
daughter named Anne, who was married to Thomas Redferne. 
Old Demdike was the senior or queen of the witches of Pendle 
and the neighborhood, but she had a jealous rival in Old Chat- 
tox, and the animosity created by their rivalry was shared by 
their families. 

Mother Demdike, however, had long reigned supreme in her 
quarters, the terror of her neighbors. According 1o her own con- 
fession, she had been a witch fifty years (the printed book says 
twenty, but there are other circumstances mentioned which show 
this was a misprint). Her own account of herself, when brought 
to trial was, that at the period just mentioned, she was one day 
" coming homeward from begging, when there met her near unto 
a stone-pit in Goldshaw, in the said forest of Pendle, a spirit or 
devil, in the shape of a boy, the one half of his coat black, and 
the other brown, who bade her stay, saying to her, that if she 
would give him her soul, she should have anything that she would 
request. Whereupon she demanded his name, and the spirit an- 
swered his name was Tibb. And so in hope of such gain as 
was promised by the said devil or Tibb, she was contented to 



268 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

give her soul to the said spirit. And for the space of five or six 
years next after, the said spirit or devil appeared at sundry times 
unto her about daylight-gate [twilight], always bidding her stay, 
and asking her what she would have or do. To whom she re- 
plied, nay, nothing ; for she said she w^anted nothing yet. And 
so about the end of the said six years, upon a sabbath-day, in the 
morning, this examinate, having a little child upon her knee, and 
she being in a slumber, the said spirit appeared unto her in the 
likeness of a brown dog, forcing himself to her knee, to get blood 
under her left arm ; and she being without any apparel saving 
her smock, the said devil did get blood under her left arm. And 
she awaking, said, ' Jesus, save my child !' but had no power, nor 
could not say, Jesus save herself! whereupon the brown dog van- 
ished out of her sight ; after which she was almost stark mad for 
the space of eight weeks." 

The child here spoken of must have been Elizabeth Device, 
one of the heroines of the present history, who in due time was 
betrayed by the evil one, and made a witch by her mother. It 
was the old woman, also, who inducted her grand-children, or 
was the means of introducing them, to the same evil and dan- 
gerous calling. James Device, the eldest of these, said in his 
confession, " that upon Sheare Thursday was two years (Easter 
eve, 1610) his grandmother, Elisabeth Southernes, alias Dem- 
dike, did bid him, this examinate, go to the church to receive the 
communion (the next day after being good Friday), and then not 
eat the bread the minister gave him, but to bring it and deliver it 
to such a thing as should meet him in his way honleward. Not- 
withstanding her persuasion, this examinate did eat the bread, 
and so in his coming homeward some forty roodes off the said 
church, there met him a thing in the shape of a hare, who spoke 
unto this examinate, and asked him whether he had brought the 
bread that his grandmother had bidden him, or no. Whereupon 
this examinate answered, he had not ; and thereupon the said 
thing threatened to pull this examinate in pieces ; and so this ex- 
aminate thereupon marked himself to God, and so the said thing 
vanished out of this examinate's sight. And within some four 
days after that, there appeared in this examinate's sight, hard by 
the new church in Pendle, a thing like unto a brown dog, who 
asked this examinate to give him his soul, and he should be re- 
venged on any whom he would ; Avhereunto the examinate an- 
swered, that his soul was not his to give, but was his Savior 
Jesus Christ's ; but as much as was in him this examinate to 
give he was contented he should have it. And within two or 



THE DEVICES OF PENDLE. 269 

three days after, this examinate went to the Carre Hall, and upon 
some speeches betwixt Mistress Towneley and this examinate, 
she charging this examinate and his said mother to have stolen 
some turves of her, bad him pack the doores ; and withall as he 
went forth of the door, the said Mistress Towneley gave him a 
knock between the shoulders. And about a day or two after 
that, there appeared unto this examinate in his way a thing like 
unto a black dog, who put this examinate in mind of the said 
Mistress Towneley's falling out with him, and bad him make a 
picture of clay like unto the said Mistress Towneley ; and he 
dried it the same night by the fire, and within a day after, he, 
this examinate, began to crumble the said picture, every day 
some, for the space of a week ; and within two days after all 
was crumbled away, the said Mistress Towneley died. And he 
further saith, that in Lent last one John Duckworth of the Launde 
promised this examinate an old shirt ; and within a fortnight 
after, this examinate went to the said Duckworth's house, and 
demanded the said old shirt; but the said Duckworth denied him 
thereof. And going out of the said house, the said spirit Dandy 
appeared unto this examinate, and said, ' Thou didst touch the 
said Duckworth.' Whereupon this examinate answered, he did 
not touch him. 'Yes,' said the spirit again, 'thou didst touch 
him, and therefore I have power of him.' Whereupon this ex- 
aminate agreed with the said spirit, and then wished the said 
spirit to kill the said Duckworth : and within one week, then 
next after, Duckworth died." 

His sister Alizon's account of her conversion to witchcraft 
was as follows. She said, that " about two years agon, her 
grandmother (called Elisabeth Southernes, alias old Demdike) 
did sundry times in going or walking together as they went beg- 
ging, persuade and advise this examinate to let a devil or famil- 
iar appear unto her ; and that she, this examinate, would let him 
suck at some part of her, and she might have and do what she 
would. And she further saith, that one John Nutter, of the Bul- 
hole in Pendle aforesaid, had a cow which was sick, and re- 
quested this examinate's grandmother to amend the said cow ; and 
her said grandmother said she would, and so her said grand- 
ttiother about ten of the clocke in the night, desired this exami- 
nate to lead her forth, which this examinate did, she being then 
blind ; and her grandmother did remain about half an hour furlh ; 
and this examinate's sister did fetch her in again ; but what she 
did when she was so forth, this examinate can not tell. But the 
next morning this examinate heard that the said cow was dead. 

23* 



270 SORCERY AND TRAGIC. 

And this examinate verily tliiiiketh that her said grandmother 
did bewitch the said cow to death. And further, this examinate 
saith, that abont two years agon, this examinate having gotten a 
piggin full of blue milk by begging, brought it into the house of her 
grandmother, Avhere (this examinate going forth presently, and 
staymg about half an hour) there was butter to the quantity of a 
quartern of a pound in the said milk, and the quantity of the said 
milk still remaining; and her grandmother had no butter in the 
house when this examinate went forth, during which time this 
examinate's grandmother still lay in her bed. And further, this 
examinate saith, that Richard Baldwin of Weethead, within the 
forest of Pendle, about two years ago, fell out with this exami- 
nate's grandmother, and so would not let her come upon his land : 
and about four or five days then next after her said grandmother 
did request this examinate to lead her forth about ten of the clocke 
in the night, which this examinate accordingly did, and she 
stayed forth then about an houre, and this examinate's sister 
fetched her in again. And this examinate heard the next morn- 
ing that a woman-child of the said Richard Baldwin was fallen 
sick ; and as this examinate did then hear, the said child did lan- 
guish afterward by the space of a year, or thereabouts, and died. 
And this examinate verily thinketh that her said grandmother did 
bewitch the said child to death." 

The youngest of the Devices, Jennet, a child of nine years, 
was as yet too young to be a witch herself, but she had been a 
careful watcher of the doings of her relatives, and appears to 
have been usually admitted to their secret meetings. 

Old Demdike must certainly have obtained the special favor 
of the evil one, if it was to be gained by the niunber of her con- 
verts, for she was not only the perverter of those of her own 
party, but of those of the rival faction also ; for old Chattox, her 
equal in age and decrepitude, if not in power, confessed that it 
was Mother Demdike who first seduced her to listen to the 
tempter. The records of the court testify that " the said Anne 
Whittle, alias Chattox, said, that about fourteen years past she 
entered, through the wicked persuasions and counsel of Elisabeth 
&outhernes, alias Demdike, and was seduced to condescend and 
agree to become subject unto that devilish abominable professiou 
of witchcraft. Soon after Avhich, the devil appeared unto her in 
the likeness of a man, about midnight, at the house of the said 
Demdike ; and thereupon the said Demdike and she went forth 
of the said house unto him ; whereupon the said wicked spirit 
moved this examinate that she would become his subject and 



THE IMAGES OF CLAY, 271 

gh^e her soul unto him. The which at first she refused to assent 
unto ; but, after, by the great persuasions made by the said Dem- 
dike, she yielded to be at his commandment and appointment. 
Whereupon the said wicked spirit then said unto her, that he must 
have one part of her body for him to suck upon ; the which she de- 
nied then to grant unto him ; and withall asked him, what part of 
her body he would have for th»t use ; who said, he M'ould have a 
place of her right side, near to her ribs, for him to suck upon ; 
whereunto she assented. And she further said, that at the same 
time there was a thing in the likeness of a spotted bitch, that 
came with the said spirit unto the said Demdike, which then did 
speak unto her in this examinate's hearing, and said, that she 
should have gold, silver, and worldly wealth, at her will ; and at 
the same time she saith there was victuals, viz., flesh, butter, 
cheese, bread, and drink, and bid them eat enough. And after 
their eating, the devil called Fancy, and the other spirit calling 
himself Tibb, carried the remnant away. And she saith, that 
although they did eat, they were never the fuller nor better for 
the same ; and that at their said banquet the said spirits gave 
them light to see what they did, although they neither had fire 
nor candlelight ; and that they were both she spirits and devils." 
Anne Redferne, Mother Chattox's daughter, held a special 
rank among these miserable people, for she was the most skilful 
of them all in making those terrible instruments of evil, the ima- 
ges of clay. Old Demdike, in her confession, declared, " that 
about half a year before Robert Nutter died, as this examinate 
thinketh, this examinate went to the house of Thomas Redferne, 
which was about midsummer, as this examinate remembereth it. 
And there, within three yards of the east end of the said house, 
she saw the said Anne Whittle, alias Chattox, and Anne Red- 
ferne, wife of the said Thomas Redferne, and daughter of the said 
Anne Whittle, alias Chattox, the one of the one side of the ditch, 
and the other on the other, and two pictures of clay or marie 
lying by them ; and the third picture the said Anne Whittle, alias 
Chattox-, was making; and the said Anne Redferne, her said 
daughter, wrought her clay or marie to make the third picture 
withall. And this examinate passing by them, the said spirit, 
called Tibb, in the shape of a black cat, appeared unto her this ex- 
aminate, and said, ' Turn back again, and do as they do.' To 
whom this examinate said, ' What are they doing?' Whereunto 
the said spirit said, 'They are making three pictures.' Where- 
upon she asked whose pictures they were. Whereunto the said 
spirit said, ' They are the pictures of Christopher Nutter, Robert 



272 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Nutter, and Mary, wife of the said Robert Nutter.' But this ex- 
aminate denying to go back to help them to make the pictures 
aforesaid, the said spirit, seeming to be angry therefore, shove 
or pushed this examinate into the ditch, and so shed the milk 
which this examinate had in a can or kit, and so thereupon the 
spirit at that time vanished out of this examinate's sight. But 
presently after that, the said spirit appeared to this examinate 
again in the shape of a hare, and so went with her about a quar- 
ter of a mile, but said nothing to this examinate, nor she to it." 

The two factions under these two rivals in mischief — the Er- 
ictho and Canidia, as they have been aptly termed, of the forest 
of Pendle — were the terror of the neighborhood. Those who 
were not witches themselves, were glad to buy on any terms the 
favor of Mother Demdike and her familar Tibb, or that of Mother 
Chattox and her imp Fancy ; and those who offended the two 
powerful sorceresses or their friends, or who failed to propitiate 
them, were sure to meet with some kind of severe punishment. 
Several of their deeds are recounted in the examinations taken 
down at the trials. Their vengeance was often the result of 
very trifling provocations, and they at times exerted their blight- 
ing influence without any provocation at all. In her second 
examination, Alizon Device, after telling the manner of her se- 
duction by her grandmother, says that not long after, "being 
walking, toward the Rough-lee, in a close of one John Robin- 
son's, there appeared unto her a thing like unto a black dog, 
speaking unto her, and desiring her to give him her soul, and he 
would give her power to do anything she would : whereupon 
this examinate being therewithal! inticed, and setting her down, 
the said black dog did with his mouth (as this examinate then 
thought) suck at her breast, a little below her paps, which place 
did remain blue half a yeare next after ; which said black dog 
did not appear to this examinate, until the eighteenth day of 
March last ; at which time this examinate met with a pedlar on 
the highway called Colne-field, near unto Colne ; and this ex- 
aminate demanded of the said pedlar to buy some pins of him ; 
but the said pedlar sturdily answered that he would not loose 
his pack ; and so this examinate parting with him, presently 
there appeareth to this examinate the black dog which appeared 
unto her as before ; which black dog spake unto her in English, 
saying, • What wouldst thou have me to do with yonder man V 
To Mdiora this examinate said, ' What canst thou do at him ?' 
And the dog answered again, ' I can lame him.' Whereupon 
this examinate answered, and said to the black dog, ' Lame 



FEUDS AMONG THE WITCHES. 273 

him ;" and before the pedlar was gone forty rods further, he fell 
down lame ; and this examinate then went after the said pedlar ; 
and in a house about the distance aforesaid, he was lying lame." 

We have seen that Alizon Device accused her grandmother 
Demdike of causing the death of a daughter of Richard Bald- 
win, the miller, about two years before the time of her arrest., 
The feud between them seems to have been lasting, for the old 
woman confessed that, a little before the Christmas of 1611, her 
daughter Elizabeth Device had been employed " in helping the 
folks at the mill," and asked her to call upon Richard Baldwin 
to demand some remuneration for her work. Probably Eliza- 
beth Device had given some cause of anger to the miller, for, as 
old Demdike, led by her granddaughter Alizon (for she was her- 
self blind), approached his house, he met them, and applying 
certain opprobrious epithets to both, threatened he would burn 
the one and hang the other unless they went their ways. As 
they were passing the next hedge, the old witch's familiar Tibb 
made his appearance, and obtained a commission to take ven- 
geance " of the miller or his." What that vengeance was, we 
are not informed. 

As far as we can discover from the facts deposed at the trial, 
the hostility between Mother Demdike and Mother Chattox arose 
from the depredations of the latter or of her family, which hap- 
pened about the close of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Eliza- 
beth Device was robbed, and some of the articles stolen were 
found immediately afterward on the person of Anne, the daugh- 
ter of Chattox (she was not at this time married to Redferne), 
and reclaimed. The anger of Mother Chattox was now great 
against the Devices, and, she being apparently powerless against 
old Demdike and her blood, her son-in-law John Device, the 
husband of Elizabeth, became so alarmed for his own safety, 
that he covenanted with Chattox to pay her yearly a measure of 
meal on condition that she should not hurt him or his goods by 
her charms. " This," said Alizon, " was yearly paid, until the 
year which her father died in, which was about eleven years 
since ; her father, upon his then death-bed, taking it that the 
said x\nne Whittle, alias Chattox, did bewitch him to death, be- 
cause the said meal was not paid the last year !" 

Many other persons seem to have been gradually drawm into 
this feud, among whom were some branches of the Nutters, a 
family rather extensively spreadr among the lesser gentry and 
yeomanry of this district. The Redfernes were tenants of the 
Nutters of Pendle in the time of old Robert Nutter, whose wife, 



274 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Elizabeth Nutter, had emploj-ed Mother Chattox to effect the 
destruction of her own grandson, known as " young Robert 
Nutter," in order that her husband's huids might go to some 
member of the same family who stood higher in her favor. Tl'is 
circumstance Ave learn from the confession of Mother Chattox 
herself, who tells us that " Elizabeth Nutter, wife to old Robert 
Nutter, did request this examinate, and Loomeshaw's wife of 
Burley, and one Jane Boothman of the same, who are now both 
dead, to get young Robert Nutter his death, if they could, all 
being together then at that time, to that end, that if Robert were 
dead, then the women their cousins might have the land ; by 
whose persuasion they all consented unto it. After which time, 
this examinate's son-in-law Thomas Redferne did persuade this 
examinate not to kill or hurt the said Robert Nutter; for which 
persuasion the said Loomeshaw's v>'ife had like to have killed 
the said Redferne, but that one Mr. Baldwyn (the late school- 
master at Coin) did by his learning stay the said Loomeshaw's 
wife, and therefor had a capon from Redferne." 

Baldwyn, the schoolmaster, was probably a " white wizard." 
Robert Nutter was thus saved from death, but his fate was 
only deferred, for not long after, as Mother Chattox further in- 
forms us, Robert Nutter who was probably ignorant of the plot 
from which he had already escaped, " did desire her daughter, 
Redferne's wife, to have his will of her, being then in Redferne's 
house ; but the said Redferne's wife denied the said Robert. 
Whereupon the said Robert seeming to be greatly displeased 
therewith, in a great anger took his horse and went away, say- 
ing in a great rage, that if ever the ground came to him she 
should never dwell upon his land." Anne Redferne told her 
mother of the threat and the circumstance which had given rise 
to it, and the latter immediately consulted her familiar Fancy, 
" who came to her in the likeness of a man, in a parcel of 
ground called the Launde, asking this examinate what she 
would have him to do ; and this examinate bade him go and re- 
venge her of the said Robert Nutter." The result was the 
death not only of Robert Nutter, but of his father, Christopher 
Nutter, the particulars of which were told at the trial by young 
Robert's brother John and his sister Margaret. 

Elizabeth Nutter had now fully obtained her desire, and the 
Redfernes were allowed to remain in their house. Some years 
after, however, we still find hostility existing between the Red- 
fernes and the Nutters of Pendle. Anthony Nutter had now, 
perhaps, inherited Elizabeth Nutter's property, and lived in the 



THE WITCHES ARRESTED. 275 

lioiise at Pendle with his daughtei- Anne. One day they offend- 
ed Mother Chattox, when she came to their house, and next day 
Anne Nutter fell sick, and, after languishing three weeks, died. 
James Device, on his examination at the trial, told a strange 
story connected with this event. He, said, that " twelve years 
ago, Anne Chattox, at a burial at the new church in Pendle, did 
take three scalps of people which had been buried and then cast 
out of a grave, as she the said Chattox told this examinate ; and 
took eight teeth out of the said scalps, whereof she kept four to 
herself, and gave other four to the said Demdike, this exami- 
nate's grandmother ; which four teeth now shown to this exam- 
inate are the four teeth that the said Chattox gave to his said 
grandmother as aforesaid ; which said teeth have ever since been 
kept, until now found by Henry Hargreaves and this examinate, 
at the west end of this examinate's grandmother's house, and 
there buried in the earth, and a picture of clay there likewise 
found by them about half a yard over in the earth where the 
said teeth lay, which said picture so found was almost withered 
away, and was the picture of Anne, Anthony Nutter's daughter." 
We have no account of the circumstances which, after these 
witches had so long enjoyed impunity, led at last to their seizure. 
Perhaps the enmity of the Nutters had something to do with it ; 
but Thomas Potts, who collected and printed the records of a 
trial in which he seems to haA^e taken a very particular interest,* 
ascribes their discovery and arrest to the zealous endeavors of 
that " very religious honest gentleman," Roger Nowell, Esq., 
" one of his majesty's justices in these parts," the representative 
of the old family of the Nowells of Read in the Pendle district. 
Four of the most notorious of these witches, Demdike and Chat- 
tox, with Aiizon Device and Anne Redferne, were captured by 
Nowell's orders, and, having each made a " full" confession, 
probably in the hope of saving their lives, he committed them 
as prisoners to Lancaster castle on the second of April, 1612, to 
take their trials at the next assizes. 

* Potts was tbe author of" The "V\''oQderful Discoverie of Witches in the Coun- 
tie of Lancaster" (4to, London, 1613), a book of some rarity, of which a reprint, 
with a considerable naass of valuable information, was edited,, in 1845, for the 
Chatham Society, by James Crossley, Esq., of Manchester. The present account 
of the Lancashire witclies is compiled entirely from the materials preserved by 
Potts, which are' the authentic copies of the confessions of the olFeuders and the 
depositions of witnesses. The common chap-hook tract, entitled '' The Lancashire 
Witches." which has been inserted by Mr. Halliwell in his " Palatine Anthology," 
was a mere catch-penny invention. 

The reader will remember the admirably conceived character of Master Thomas 
Potts, in Aiusworth's romance. 



276 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Their chief place of resort, Malkin tower, remained as yet 
unvisited and untouched. It was a place looked upon with awe 
by the peasantry, and few but Old Demdike and her confederates 
cared to approach it. Strange noises were heard about it, and it 
was haunted by beings still more strange. James Device, in his 
examination before Justice Nowell, deposed that, " about a month 
ago, as this examinate was coming toward his mother's house, 
and at day-gate [twilight] of the same night, he met a brown dog 
coming from his grandmother's house, about ten roods distant 
from the same house ; and about two or three nights after, he 
heard a voice of a great number of children shrieking and crying 
pitifully, about daylight-gate, and likewise abo.ut ten roods distant 
of this examinate's said grandmother's house. And about five 
nights then next following, within twenty roods of the said Eliz- 
abeth Southerne's house, he heard a foul yelling like unto a great 
number of cats ; but what they were, this examinate can not tell." 

It was here that, during Mother Demdike's life, the witches 
of these parts held their grand and solemn meetings, which took 
place annually on Good Friday. The day of assembly was just 
at hand when Demdike was arrested, but many of the witches 
who had escaped met as usual, in spite of her absence. In fact, 
the meeting at the Malkin tower, on the Good Friday of 1612, 
seems to have been better attended than usual. There was, we 
are told, " great cheer, merry company, and much conference." 
The objects of this conference were of some importance. It was 
Elizabeth Device who presided, and of course now the object of 
most interest to her was the delivery of her mother. It was, we 
are told, proposed to kill the jailer of Lancaster castle, set all 
the prisoners at liberty, and blow up the castle, by a few old 
women assembled in an old ruinous tawer. But what might not 
old women do, when they had Satan to assist them ? The mat- 
ters which were intended to be originally debated or performed 
at this meeting were the christening of a familiar for Alizon Dev- 
ice, and the bewitching of certain individuals who had recently 
given them offence. 

But while thus consulting, the witches were not aware that a 
young traitor was sitting among them. This was Jennet Device, 
the youngest of the granddaughters of Old Device^ and the child 
of the very woman who was presiding over the meeting in her ab- 
sence. This ill-conditioned child, a girl of nine years old, gave 
information to the zealous Justice Nowell of the meeting at the 
Malkin tower, and told him who were present. Within a few 
days the number of persons implicated in this affair, imprisoned 



THE MEETING AT MALKIN TOWER. 277 

in Lancaster castle, was increased to twelve, among whom were 
Elizabeth Device, her son James, and Alice Nutter, of Rough 
Lee, a lady of fortune. 

From the informer, Jennet Device, the worthy justice extracted 
a more particular account of the feast at the Malkin tower. She 
said there were about twenty persons present, of whom three 
only were men, and that the hour of meeting was twelve o'clock 
of the day. They had to their dinner, beef, bacon, and roasted 
mutton ; " which mutton, as this examinate's brother said, was 
of a wether of Christopher Swyer's, of Barley; which wether 
was brought in the night before into this examinate's mother's 
house by the said James Device, and in this examinate's sight 
was killed and eaten as^aforesaid." John Balcock, one of the 
men present at this meeting, turned the spit. A woman named 
Preston, of Craven, in Yorkshire, was brought by her familiar, 
who had taken the form of a white foal for that purpose. James 
Device, who confessed that he had been present at the meeting 
in Malkin Tower, added, " that all the witches went out of the 
said house in their own shapes and likenesses. And they all, by 
that they were forth of the doors, got on horseback like unto 
foals, some of one color, some of another ; and Preston's wife 
was the last ; and when she got on horseback, they all presently 
vanished out of this examinate's sight. And before their said 
parting away, they all appointed to meet at the said Preston's 
wife's house that day twelvemonth ; at which time the said Pres- 
ton's wife promised to make them a* great feast. And if they had 
occasion to meet in the meantime, there should warning be giv- 
en, that they all should meet upon Romleyes Moor." 

Several of the persons at this meeting were related in some 
way or other to the Devices or to their rivals, and they appear to 
have been generally of a very equivocal character in other re- 
spects. One person now implicated, in this affair, Alice Nutter, 
of Rough Lee, alone excites much sympathy. She was a woman 
of considerable property, and held a respectable position among 
the better families in the county. Rough Lee, her residence, is 
still standing, and is a good specimen of the gentleman's house 
of that period. Jennet Device, the little girl, was evidently sub- 
orned to swear away the lives of her relatives, and there appeared 
good reason for believing that she introduced Alice Nutter into 
the plot at the desire of some of that lady's relatives, who were 
eager to obtain her property, which would come to them by her- 
itage on her death. It has been further handed down by tradi- 
tion that Justice Nowell owed the lady a grudge on account of a 

24 



278 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

long-disputed question of a boundary between their lands, and 
that he at least gave encouragement to this conspiracy against her. 

The charges brought against Alice Nutter on the trial were 
chielly remarkable for their weakness. Jennet Device and her 
brother James declared that she was at the meeting at the Mal- 
kin tower on Good Friday, and Elizabeth Device said she joined 
with her and Old Demdike in bewitching a man named Mitton, 
to death, merely because the said Mitton had refused to give Old 
Demdike a penny. 

Old Demdike escaped the cruelty of the law by dying in pris- 
on a few days after she had been committed. Thus Mother 
Chattox became the chief of the witches who were brought into 
court for trial on the 19th of August. Sl^e is described as " a very 
old, withered, spent, and decrepit creature, her sight almost gone." 
Mother Chattox was quite blind ; her lips were " ever chattering 
and talking, but no man knew what ;" and she was " always more 
ready to do mischief to men's goods than themselves ;" in this 
respect the contrary of Demdike, who took delight in killing and 
tormenting the persons of her enemies. She was, nevertheless, 
notorious as " a dangerous vv^itch," and was " always opposite to 
Old Demdike, for whom the one favored, the other hated dead- 
ly." Between them, no doubt, the forest of Pendle must have 
been an agreeable neighborhood. Yet Mother Chattox had some 
feelings of affection, for when judgment was pronounced upon 
her, she cried out in a distracted manner that God would be mer- 
ciful to her, and falling on her knees, supplicated the judge that 
he would " be merciful unto Anne Redferne, her daughter." 
Demdike's daughter, Elizabeth Device, was next brought to the 
bar. " This odious witch was branded with a preposterous mark 
in nature, even from her birth, which was her left eye standing 
lower than the other ; the one looking down, the other looking 
up, so strangely deformed that the best that were present in that 
honorable assembly and great audience did affirm that they had 
not often seen the like." When this woman saw her own child 
stand up in evidence against her, she burst into a violent passion, 
" according to her accustomed manner, outrageously ' cursing, 
cried out against the child in such a fearful manner, as all the 
court did not a little wonder at her, and so amazed the child, as 
with weeping tears she cried out to my lord the judge, and told 
him she was not able to speak in the presence of her mother." 
In the end they were obliged to take Elizabeth Device away, and 
then the daughter gave her evidence unconcerned. The other 
prisoners were then brought to their trial in succession. Four, 



EXECUTION OF THE WITCHES. 279 

Chattox, Elizabeth Device, and the two children of the latter 
(James ^nd Alizon), had made confessions, and therefore they 
had little to hope. With them were convicted Anne Redferne, 
Alice Nutter, Katharine Hewit, John Bulcock, and his vi^ife Jane, 
all of Pendle, and Isabel Roby, of Windle, in the parish of Pres- 
cot, who maintained their innocence to the last. They were all 
burnt the day after their trial, " at the common place of execu- 
tion near to Lancaster." One Margaret Pearson, of Padiham, 
though convicted of being a witch, was dealt more leniently with, 
being only condemned to exposure on the pillory. Two others 
were acquitted. 

Young Jennet Device, who for her age appears to have pos- 
sessed at least as evil disposition as any of them, was spared as 
the principal evidence against the accused. Her declaration 
proved that she was not unacquainted with the practices of her pa- 
rents, and she confessed, " that her mother had taught her two pray- 
ers, the one to cure the bewitched, and the other to get drink."* 

* The prayer, or rather charm, to cure tliose bewitched, -which Jennet Device had 
learaed from her mother, was as follows, and from its jjhraseology was evidently 
then of considerable antiquity. 

" Upon Good Friday, 1 will fast while I may 

Untill I beare them knell 

Our Lord's owne bell. 

Lord in his niesse 

With his twelve apostles good. 

What hath he in his hand ' 

Ligh in leath wand. 

"What hath he in his other hand? 

Heaven's doore key. 

Open, open, heaven doore keyes. 

Steck, steck, hell doore 

Let crizum child 

Goe to its mother mild. 

What is yonder that casts a light so farrandly ? 

Mine owne deare sonne that's naild to the tree. 

He is naild sore by the heart and hand, 

And holy harne panne. 

Well is tliat man, 

That Fryday speil can, 

His child to learne ; 

A cross of blew, and another of red, 

As good Lord was to the roode. 

Gabriel laid him downe to sleepe 

Upon the ground of holy weepe; 

Good Lord came walking by, 

Sleepst thou, wakest thou, Gabriel ? 

Nn, Lord, I am sted with sticke and stake, 

That I can neither sleepe nor wake. 

Kise up, Gabriel, and goe with me. 

The sticke nor the stake shall never deere thee. 

Sweet Jesus, our Lord, amen. 

It is a mere farrago of popish religious verses. 



280 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

One other of the witches who met at the fatal assembly in Mal- 
kin tower was brought to the scalibld at the same time. This 
was Jennet Preston, of Gisborne, in Craven, who was tried at 
York for bewitching some members of the family of Lister, in 
Craven, and for other similar oflences ; but the principal evidence 
against her was derived from the confessions of Elizabeth, James, 
and Jennet Device. It was she who rode to the Malkin tower 
on a white foal. She died without confession. 

Jennet Device only escaped the scaflbld on this occasion, as 
it has been supposed, to undergo somewhat later the same dread- 
fnl punishrnent that she had brought on so many of her relatives. 
Twenty years after the events detailed above, the witches still 
continued to hold their meetings in the forest of Pendle, in great- 
er numbers than ever, but for some reason or other the old ren- 
dezvous at Malkin tower seems to have been deserted, and they 
now assembled at a place at some distance from it named the 
Hoar-stones, a house which is said to be still standing. On the 
]Oth of February, 1633, a lad named Edmund Robinson, the son 
of a poor mason in Pendle forest, made the following strange 
declaration before two justices of the peace. He said that on 
All Saints' day, in the preceding year, he was gathering bullies 
or wild plums in Wheatley lane, when he saw two greyhounds, 
one black, and the other brown, running over the next field to- 
ward him. They came to him familiarly, and then he perceived 
they had each a collar, which " did shine like gold," and to which 
a string was attached. Seeing that nobody followed the grey- 
hounds, he imagined they belonged to some of the neighbors and 
had broke loose, and, as at that moment a hare started up at a 
short distance from him, he thought he would set them to hunt 
it, and pointing at it, he cried, " Loo, loo !" but to no purpose, for 
the dogs would not run. " Whereupon, being very angry, he 
took them, and with the strings that were at their collars, tied 
either of them to a little bush at the next hedge, and with a rod 
that he had in his hand he beat them ; and instead of the black 
greyhound one Dickinson's wife stood up, a neighbor whom this 
informer knoweth, and instead of the brown greyhound a little 
boy whom this informer knoweth not." Young Robinson pro- 
ceeded to state that, in his terror, he attempted to run away, but 
was arrested by the woman, who " put her hand into her pocket, 
and pulled out a piece of silver much like unto a fair shilling, 
and offered to give him to hold his tongue, and not to tell, which 
he refused, saying, ' Nay, thou art a witch !' Whereupon she 
put her hand into her pocket again, and pulled out a siring like 



YOUNG ROBINSON'S ADVENTURES. 281 

unto a bridle that jingled, which she put upon the little boy's 
head that stood up in the brown greyhound's stead, whereupon 
the said boy stood up a white horse." The woman now seized 
upon Edmund Robinson, placed him on the horse before her, and 
rode with him to Hoar-stones, where " there were divers persons 
about the door, and he saw divers others coming riding upon 
horses of several colors toward the house, which tied their hor- 
res to a hedge near to the said house ; and which persons went 
into the said house, to the number of threescore or thereabouts, 
as this informer thinketh, where they had a fire and meat roast- 
ing, and some other meat stirring in the house, whereof a young 
woman, whom he this informer knoweth not, gave him flesh and 
bread upon a trencher, and drink in a glass, which after the first 
taste he refused, and would have no more, and said it was naught. 
And presently after, seeing divers of the company going to a barn 
near adjoining, he followed after, and there he saw six of them 
kneeling and pulling at six several ropes which were fastened or 
tied to the top of the house, at or with which pulling came then 
in this informer's sight flesh smoking, butter in lumps, and milk, 
as it were, syleing fstrainijigj from the said ropes, all which fell 
into basins which were placed under the said ropes. And after 
that these six had done, there came other six which did likewise, 
and during all the time of their so pulling, they made such foul 
faces that feared this informer, so as he was glad to steal out and 
run home." He further stated that the women in the barn had 
there "pictures" or images, which they were pricking with 
thorns. 

No sooner was young Robinson's flight discovered, than a party 
of the witches, of whom the foremost was Dickinson's wife just 
mentioned, the wife of a man named Loynd or Loyne, and Jen- 
net Device,* joined in the pursuit, and they had nearly overtaken 
him at a spot which bore the somewhat ominous name of Bog- 
gard-hole, when the appearance of two horsemen caused them 
to desist. His troubles, however, were not thus ended, for on 
his return home in the evening, " his father bade him go fetch 
home two kyne to scale ftie up in their stalls J, and in the way, 
in a field called the Oilers, he chanced to hap upon a boy who 
began to quarrel with him, and they fought so together till this 
informer had his ears made very bloody by fighting, and looking 
down he saw the boy had a cloven foot, at which sight he was 

* There is some room, after all, for doubt if this Jennet Device be the same who 
figured in the trials in 1612. In the copy of the deposition in Lord Londesborough'a 
manuscript she is described as " Jennet Device uxor Willielmi Device." 



282 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

afraid, and ran away from him to seek the kyne. And in the 
way he saw a light like a lantern, toward which he made haste, 
supposing it to be carried by some of Mr. Robinson's people [one 
of their more wealthy neighbors] ; but when he came to the 
place, he only found a woman standing on a bridge, whom, when 
he saw her, he knew to be Loynd's wife, and knowing her, he 
turned back again, and immediately he met with the aforesaid 
boy, from whom he offered to run, which boy gave him a blow on 
the back which caused him to cr5^" The boy's father, in con- 
firmation of this story, acknowledged sending him for the two 
kyne, and added that, thinking he stayed longer than he should 
have done, " he went to seek him, and in seeking him heard him 
cry very pitifully, and found him so afraid and distracted, that he 
neither knew his father, nor did he know where he was, and so 
continued very near a quarter of an hour before he came to him- 
self," when he told his father the same story which he now re- 
peated before the magistrates. 

The boy Robinson, in his deposition, mentioned the names of 
such of the persons present at the meeting at Hoar- stones as he 
knew, who were immediately seized and committed to Lancaster 
castle. As he said he should recogtiise the others if he saw 
them, he was carried about by his father and others to the 
churches of the neighboring parishes to examine congregations, 
and in this way he gained a considerable sum of money. John 
Webster, whose " Displaying of Witchcraft" is one of the best 
books on the subject published during the seventeenth century, 
has given lis a curious account of these proceedings. " It came 
to pass," he says, " that this said boy was brought into the church 
of Kildwick, a large parish church where I (being then curate 
there) was preaching in the afternoon, and was set upon a stall 
(he being but about ten or eleven years old) to look about him, 
which moved some little disturbance in the congregation for a 
while. And after prayers I inquiring what the matter was, the 
people told me that it was the boy that discovered witches, upon 
which I went to the house where he was to stay all night, where 
I found him and two very unlikely (ill-looking) persons that did 
conduct him and manage his business.. I desired to have some 
discourse with the boy in private, but that they utterly refused. 
Then, in the presence of a great many people, I took the boy 
near me, and said, ' Good boy, tell me truly, and in earnest, did 
thou see and hear such strange things of the meeting of witches 
as is reported by many that thou dost relate, or did not some per- 
son teach thee lo say such things of thyself V But the two men 



THE YOUNG WITCH-FINDER. 283 

not giving the boy leave to answer, did pluck him from me, and 
said he had been examined by two able justices of the peace, 
and they did never ask him such a question ; to whom I replied, 
the persons accused therefore had the more wrong." 

By means like these, a number of wretched persons were 
thrown into prison, to the amount of nearly thirty. They Avere 
no sooner arrested, than people were found to accuse them of a 
variety of crimes, chiefly that of killing or seriously injuring peo- 
ple by witchcraft. It is rather a singular coincidence of names, 
that Jennet Device was charged with killing Isabelle the wife 
of William Nutter. The crime of another, Mary Spencer, was 
" causeing a pale or cellocke to come to her full of water fourteen 
yards up a hill from a well." Another, named Margaret. John- 
son, was accused of killing Henry Heape, and of wasting and 
impairing the body of Jennet Shackleton. As the evidence ap- 
pears to have been otherwise rather deficient, all these persons 
were searched for marks, which v/ere found in great abundance, 
and it is stated, at the end of the list, that against one person put 
on her trial, there was "no evidence found, only in search a 
mark found on her body."* At the ensuing assizes at Lancaster 
the prisoners were all put upon their trial, and no less than sev- 
enteen were on such evidence found guilty. One of them at 
least, Margaret Johnson, had made a confession, which, as con- 
taining apparently an abstract of the full character of a witch ac- 
cording to the belief of Lancashire at this periodj deserves to be 
printed. It is here given, verbatim, from Lord Londesborough's 
manuscript. Margaret Johnson, on the 9th of March, 1633, be- 
fore the same justices who had taken the deposition of the boy 
Robinson, said, " that betweene seven or eight yeares since, shea 
beeing in her house at Marsden in greate passion and anger, and 
discontented, and withall oppressed with some want, there ap- 
peared unto her aspiritordevill in the similitude and proportion of a 
man apparrelled in a suite of blacke, tied about with silke pointes, 
whoe offered her, yf shee would give him her soule, hee would 
supply all her wantes, and bring to her whatsoever shee wanted 
or needed, and at her appointment would helpe her to kill and 
revenge her either of men or beaste, or what she desired ; and 

* A very. curious volume of manuscripts relating to magic azid sorcery, recently 
published by Lord Londesborougb, contains early copies of the depositions of Ed- 
mund Robinson and bis father, of the confession of Margaret Johnson, which is given 
farther on, and of the list of persons brought to trial, with the description of their 
marks, and an enumeration of the crimes vrith which they were charged. The 
marks are described too minutely to allow of this curious paper being printed in a 
work like the present. 



234 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

after a sollicitacion or two shee contracted and condicioned with 
the said devill or spiritt for her soule. And the said devill bad 
her call him by the name of Memillion, and when shee called 
hee would bee ready to doe her will. And shee saith that in all 
her talke and conference shee called the said Memillion her god 
. . . And shee further saith that shee was not at the greate meet- 
inge of the witches at Harestones in the forrest of Pendle on 
All Saintes day last past, but saith that shee was at a second 
meetinge the Sunday after All Saintes day at the place aforesaid, 
where there was at that time betweene thirty and forty witches, 
which did all ride to the said meetinge. And the end of the said 
meetinge was to consult for the killing and hurting of man and 
beastes ; and that there was one devill or spiritt that was more 
greate and grand devill then the rest, and yf anie witch desired to 
have such an one, they might have such an one to kill or hurt 
anie body. And shee further saith, that such witches as have 
sharpe boanes are generally for the devill to prick them with 
which have no papps nor duggs, but raiseth blood from the place 
pricked with the boane, which witches are more greate and grand 
witches than they which have papps or dugs. And shee beeing 
further asked what persons were at their last meetinge, she named 
one Carpnall and his wife, Rason and his wife, Pickhamer and 
his wife, Duffy and his wife, and one Jane Carbonell, whereof 
Pickhamer's wife is the most greate,- grand, and auncyent witch ; 
and that one witch alone can kill a beast, and yf they bidd their 
spirit or devill to goo and pricke or hurt anie man in anie partic- 
uler place, hee presently will doe it. And that their spiritts have 
usually knowledge of their bodies. And shee further saith the 
men witches have woemen spiritts, and woemen witches have 
men spiritts ; and that Good Friday is one of their constant dales 
of their generall meetings, and that on Good Friday last they had 
a meetinge neere Pendle water side ; and saith that their spirit 
doelh tell them where their meetings must bee, and in what 
place ; and saith that if a witch desire to bee in anie place upon 
a suddaine, that on a dogg or a rod or a catt their spiritt will 
presently convey them thither, or into any roome in any man's 
house. But shee saith it is not the substance of their bodies 
that doeth goe into anie such roomes, but their spiritts that as- 
sume such shape and forme. And shee further saith that the 
devill, after hee begins to sucke, will make a papp or a dugg in a 
short time, and the matter hee sucketh is blood. And further 
saith that the devill can raise foule wether and stormes, and soo 
hee did at their meetinges. And she further saith that when the 



THE IMPOSTURE DISCOVERED. 285 

devill came to suck her papp, he came to her in the lickness of 
a catt, sometimes of one collour and sometimes of another. And 
since this trouble befell her, her spiritt hath left her, and shee 
never sawe him since." 

Although the jury were satisfied with the evidence in this 
case, such was not the case with the judge, who respited the 
prisoners, and the affair was reported to the king in council. 
Charles I. had not the same weak prejudices in these matters as 
his father, and by his orders, an inquiry was instituted at Ches- 
ter, under the direction of the bishop, the result of which was 
that four of the convicted witches, Margaret Johnson (whose 
confession has just been given), Frances Dickenson, Mary 
Spencer, and the wife of one of the Hargreaves, were sent to 
London, and there examined, first by the king's physicians, and 
then by the king in person. Strong suspicions having arisen, 
the boy was separated from his father (they had both been 
brought to London), and then he confessed that the whole was 
an imposture, and that he had been taught to say what he had 
said by his father and some other persons who had conspired to 
get up this story as a profitable speculation. He declared that on 
the day when he said he was carried to the meeting at Hoar- 
stones, he was a mile off gathering plums in another man's 
orchard. Fortunately none of the pretended witches had been 
executed. 

Such was the end of the second great case of witchcraft in 
Lancashire, which became from many circumstances, but espe- 
cially by the king's interference and the transferring of the case 
to London, one of the most celebrated in England. The Lan- 
cashire witches have gained a new celebrity at the present day 
by furnishing the plot of one of the best romances of one of the 
most popular and admired of our writers, Harrison Ainsworth. 
The term itself had become so famous that it has long been in 
that county transferred to a class of witches of the same sex, but 
of a very diff"erent character, and no festival there is now con- 
sidered perfect until the toast of " the Lancashire Witches" of 
the present day has been drunk. 



286 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

WITCHCRAFT IN ENGLAND DURING THE EARLIER PART 
OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

The case of the Lancashire witches, in 1612, seems to have 
been the first grand exernplifieation of King James's witchcraft 
doctrines in England. Yet though the published cases of witch- 
craft during that monarch's reign are not very numerous, there 
can be no doubt that the superstition itself was widely prevalent 
throughout the country, and that it gave rise to innumerable in- 
stances of persecution. In the same year, 1611, five witches 
v/ere executed at Northampton, of whom one only, a man, made 
a confession. He said that he had three spirits, whom he 
called Grissill, Ball, and Jack. In 1615, there was a rather 
remarkable case of witchcraft at Lynn, in Norfolk. Relations 
of both of these cases were printed, and dispersed abroad. In 
1618, an event of this kind occurred on the borders of the coun- 
ties of Leicester and Lincoln, which was still more remarkable 
as having occurred in one of the noblest families in the land. 

Sir Francis Manners succeeded his brother Roger in the earl- 
dom of Rutland in 1612, and soon distinguished himself by the 
magnificent hospitality which he exercised at his castle of Bel- 
voir. He had two sons, Henry and Francis, and a daughter 
Katherine ; the first of these died about the year 1614, and he 
was followed to the grave by his younger brother within two 
years. The only remaining child, who afterward married the 
duke of Buckingham, was also taken with a severe illness, from 
which she was hardly expected to recover. In the hamlet ad- 
joining to the castle there lived an old woman named Joan Flow- 
er, with two daughters, whose poverty excited the compassion 
of the earl and his lady, and the mother was employed in the 
castle as a chairwoman, while her eldest daughter Margaret was 
received into the household as a servant. It was soon found, 
however, that Mother Flowers was undeserving of the kindness 
thus shown to her ; she gave ofTence by her evil manners, and 
by the disorders of her house, where people of no good reputa- 
tion came to visit her younger daughter Philip, and at last Mar- 
garet Flower was discharged from her place for purloining the 



THE WITCHES OF BELVOIR. 2S7 

provisions at the castle to furnisli the visiters at her mother's 
house. All this had occurred before the death of the earl's chil- 
dren, and, as the countess had acted generously toward the 
daughter when, she was discharged, they were never suspected 
of malice. 

However, reports of a sinister character touching the proceed- 
ings of the family of Joan Flower soon spread abroad. They 
had gained the reputation of being witches, and it began to be 
whispered about that the earl's children had perished by their 
agency. Witches appear to have been rather numerous in this 
vicinity, and as the reports became more rife, a number of ar- 
rests, including the three Flowers and other persons, were made 
just before the Christmas of 1617, and the prisoners were lodged 
in Lincoln jail. The mother, Joan Flowers, when she was 
committed to prison, is said to have asked for bread and butter, 
which she wished impiously might be her death if she were 
guilty of the crime of which she was accused ; but she no soon- 
er attempted to swallow it, than she was choked and instantly 
expired. The earl of Rutland was at the time in London ; 
when, however, he heard of the imprisonment of the witches, 
and the crimes that were imputed to them, he hastened with his 
brother. Sir George Manners, to Lincoln, and assisted at their 
examination. They all confessed, were, as might be expected, 
duly convicted, and were executed early in the March of the 
year 1618.* 

Among the witnesses on this occasion Avas a woman — appa- 
rently an old one — named Joan Willimott, of Goodby in Leices- 
tershire, who confessed " that she hath a spirit which she cal- 
leth Pretty, which was given unto her by William Berry of 
Langholme in Rutlandshire, whom she served three years ; and 
that her master, when he gave it unto her, willed her to open 
her mouth, and he would blow into her a fairy which should do 
her good ; and that she opened her mouth, and he did blow into 
her mouth ; and that presently after his blowing there came out 
of her mouth a spirit, which stood upon the ground, in the shape 
and form of a woman, which spirit asked of her her soul, which 
she then promised unto it, being willed thereunto by her master. 
She further confessed, that she never hurt anybody, but did help 
divers that sent for her, which were stricken or forespoken ; 
and that her spirit came weekly to her, and would tell her of 

" The earl and the countess were so far satisfied that their children died by 
■witchcraft, that it was stated in the inscription on their monument in Bottesford 
church. 



268 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

divers persons that were stricken and forespoken. And she 
sailh, that the use which she had of the spirit, was to know how 
those did which she had undertaken to amend ; and that she did 
help them by certain prayers which she used, and not by her 
own spirit; neither did she employ her spirit in anything, but 
only to bring word how those did that she had undertaken to cure." 
Another witness, named Ellen Green, of Stathoriie in the 
same county, said, " that one Joan Willimott of Goodby came 
about six years since to her in the Wolds, and persuaded this 
examinate to forsake God, and betake her to the devil, and she 
would give her two spirits, to which she gave her consent, and 
thereupon the said Joan Willimott called two spirits, one in the 
likeness of a kitten, and the other of a moldiwarp [a mole] ; the 
first, the said Willimott called Pusse, the other Hiffehifte, and 
they presently came to her ; and she departing left them with 
the examinate, and they leaped on her shoulder ; and the kitten 
sucked under her right ear or her neck, and the moldiwarp on 
the left side in the like place. After they had sucked her, she 
sent the kitten to a baker of that town, whose name she remem- 
bers not, who had called her witch and struck her ; and bade her 
said spirit go and bewitch him to death. The moldiwarp she 
then bade go to Anne Dawson of the same town and bewitch 
her to death, because she had called this examinate witch and 
jade ; and within one fortnight they both died. And further, 
this examinate saith, that she sent both her spirits to Stonesby, 
to one Willison, a husbandman, and Robert Williman, a hus- 
bandman's son, and bade the kitten go to Willison and bewitch 
him to death, and the moldiwarp to the other and bewitch him to 
death, which they did, and within ten days they died. These 
four were bewitched while this examinate dwelt at Waltham afore- 
said. About three years since, this examinate removed thence to 
Stathorne, where she now dwelt ; upon a difference between 
the said Willimott and the wife of John Patchet of the said Sta- 
thorne, yeoman, she, the said Willimott, called her, this exami- 
nate, to go and touch the said John Patchet's wife and her child, 
which she did, touching the said John Patchet's wife in her 
bed, and the child in the grace-wife's arms, and then sent her 
said spirits to bewitch them to death, which they did, and so 
the woman lay languishing by the space of a month and more, 
for then she died : the child died the next day after she touched 
it. And she further saith, that the said Joan Willimott had a 
spirit sucking on her under the left flank in the likeness of a 
little white dog, which this examinate saith that she saw the 



THE WITCEES OF BELVOIR. 289 

same sucking in barley-harvest last, being then at the house of 
the said Joan Willimott." 

Both the daughters of Mother Flowers confessed, and Mar- 
garet gave the following account of the proceedings relating to 
the earl of Rutland's family : " She saith and confesseth, that 
about four or five years since her mother sent her for the right- 
hand glove of Henry Lord Rosse, afterward that her mother 
bade her go again into the castle of Belvoir, and bring down the 
glove or some other thing of Henry Lord Rosse ; whereupon 
she brought down a glove, and delivered the same to her mother, 
Avho stroked Rutterkin, her cat, with it ; after it was dipped in 
hot water, and so pricked it often, after Avhich Henry Lord 
Rosse fell sick within a week, and v/as much torm.ented with 
the same. She further saith, that finding a glove about two or 
three years since of Francis Lord Rosse on a dunghill, she de- 
livered it to her mother, who put it into hot water ; and after 
took it out and rubbed it on Rutterkin the cat, and bade him go 
upward ; and after her mother buried it in the yard, and said a 
mischief light on him, but he v,'ill not mend again. She further 
said, that her mother and she, and her sister, agreed together to 
bewitch the earl and his lady, that they might have no more 
children ; and being demanded the cause of this their malice 
and ill-will, she saith, that about four years since the countess 
(growing into some mislike with her) gave her forty shillings, 
a bolster, and a mattress, and bade her bide at home and come 
no more to dwell at the castle ; Avhich she not only took in ill 
part, but grudged at it exceedingly, swearing in her heart to be 
revenged ; after this her mother complained to the earl against 
one Peake, who had offered her some wrong, wherein she con- 
ceived that the earl took not her part, as she expected, which 
dislike with the rest exasperated her displeasure against him, 
and so shewatched the opportunity to be revenged : whereupon 
she took wool out of the said mattress, and a pair of gloves, 
which were given her by Mr. Vavasor, and put them into warm 
water, mingling them with some blood, and stirring it together ; 
then she took the wool and gloves out of the water, and rubbed 
them on the body of Rutterkin her cat, saying the lord and the 
lady should have more children, but it should be long first. She 
further confessed, that bj'' her mother's commandment, she 
brought to her a piece of a handkerchief of the lady Katherine, 
the earl's daughter; and her mother put it into hot water, and 
then taking it out rubbed it on Rutterkin, bidding him fly and go, 
whereupon Rutterkin whined and cried ' Mew ;' whereupon she 

25 



290 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

said, that Rutterkin had no power over the lady Katherine to 
hurt her." Her sister, Philip Flowers, declared, that " about 
the 30ih of January last past, being Saturday, four devils ap- 
peared unto her in Lincoln jail, at eleven or twelve o'clock at 
midnight ; the one stood at her bed's foot, with a black head like 
an ape, and spake unto her, but what she can not well remem- 
ber, at which she was very angry, because he would speak no 
plainer, or let her understand his meaning : the other three were 
Rutterkin, little Robin, and Spirit, but she never mistrusted them, 
nor suspected herself till then." 

The Roman catholics in England were very active during the 
reign of James I., and they attempted to take advantage of the 
popular credulity in getting up cases of possession in imitation 
of their brethren on the continent ; one of the most remarkable 
cases of this kind occurred in Lancaster in 1612, and led to a 
trial on the same day with that of the witches of Pendle. 

The village of Samlesbury is at some distance from the Pen- 
die district, nearer to Preston, but it was probably the reports of 
the deeds of Mothers Demdike and Chattox that suggested the 
plot now to be related. The principal family in this township 
were the Southworths, who had their head seat at Samlesbury 
park, and who seem to have been much divided among themselves 
— a division which was increased by religious difterences, for 
some of them were protestants and others catholics. Lancashire 
was at this time remarkable for the number of papists which it 
harbored — it was the grand asylum of the English seminary 
priests, and there are documents which show that Samlesbury 
park was a well-known resort of the partisans of Rome. One 
of these priests was Christopher Southworth, who for conceal- 
ment had assumed the name of Thom.pson, and who appears to 
have been nearly related to Sir John Southworth, the occupier 
of the park, who was then recently dead. Between Sir John 
and one of his female relations, Jane Southworth, there was a 
bitter feud, for what reason is not stated ; a servant of Sir 
John's, named John Singleton, deposed, that " he had often 
heard his old master say, that the said Jane Southworth was, as 
he thought, an evil woman and a witch ;" and he added, " that 
the said Sir John Southworth, in his coming or going between 
his own house at Samlesbury and the town of Preston, did for 
the most part forbear to pass by the house where the said wife 
dwelt, though it was his nearest and best way, and rode another 
way, only for fear of the said wife, as this examinate verily 
thinketh." This statement was confirmed by another witness, 



THE WITCHES OF SAMLESBUEY. 291 

a yeoman of Samlesbiiry, named William Alker, who deposed, 
" that he had seen the said Sir John Southworlh shun the said 
wife when he came near where she was, and hath heard the 
said Sir John say that he liked her not, and that he doubted she 
would bewitch him." As far as we can gather, it appears fur- 
ther, that Jane Southworth was a recent convert from Romanism 
to the church of England. 

There was in the same village a family of the name of Bier- 
ley. Jennet Bierley was an aged woman, who appears to have 
lived with a daughter-in-law, Ellen Bierley ; her own daughter 
had married Thomas Sowerbuts of Samlesbury, a husbandman, 
and by her he had a "daughter, Grace Sowerbuts, who was at 
this time about fourteen years of age. Jennet and Ellen Bier- 
ley were protestants, while Thomas Sowerbuts was a catholic, 
and there was probably a quarrel between them on account of 
the religion of the child, which Thomas Sowerbuts resoh^ed 
should be that of Rome, and for that purpose he sent her for 
religious instruction to the priest Thompson [alias Southworth). 

Soon after or about the time of the seizure of the witches of 
Pendle, Grace Sowerbuts pretended to be seized with strange 
fits, and she was found in a sort of trance among the hay and 
straw in a barn, whence she was taken to her father's house, and 
there told a story which led to the arrest of Jane Southworth, and 
Jennet and Ellen Bierley, and they were committed to Lancas- 
ter jail. They were brought to trial on the 19th of August, 1612, 
and then Grace Sowerbuts made a statement in court, to the 
effect that, after having been " haunted and vexed" for some 
years by the prisoners and another confederate, named Old Doe- 
wife, these four women had lately drawn her by the hair of the 
head to the top of a hay-mow, where they left her. Not long 
after this, Jennet Bierley met her near her home, appearing to 
her first in human likeness, " and after that in the likeness of a 
black dog," and attempted to terrify her. The girl told her 
father what had happened, and how she had often been " haunt- 
ed" in this manner ; and being asked by the court why she 
never told anybody before, she said, " she could not speak 
thereof, though she desired so to do." Soon after this, on the 
fourth of April, " going toward Samlesbury back to meet her 
mother, coming from Preston, she saw the said Jennet Bierley, 
who met this examinate at a place called the Two Brigs, first 
in her own shape, and afterward in the likeness of a black dog 
with two legs, which dog went close by the left side of this ex- 
aminate till they came to a pit of water, and then the said dog 



292 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

spake, and persuaded this examinate to drown herself therein, 
saying it was a fair and an easy death ; Avhereupon this exami- 
nate thought there came o.ne to her in a white sheet, and carried 
her away from the said pit, upon the coming whereof the said 
black dog departed away." The dog subsequently returned, and 
carried her to a neighbor's barn, where it left her in a trance on 
the floor. She went on to describe other instances of persecu- 
tion by the witches, and declared that on one occasion her grand- 
mother and aunt had taken her by night to the house of a man 
named Thomas Walshman, which they entered " she knew not 
how," and Jennel Bierley caused the death of an infant child ; 
and the night after the burial of the child, " the said Jennet Bier- 
ley, and Ellen Bierley, taking this examinate Avith them, went 
to Samlesbury church, and there did take up the said child, and 
the said Jennet did carry it out of the churchyard in her arms, 
and then did put it in her lap and carried it home to her own 
house, and having it there, did boil some thereof in a pot, and 
some did broil on the coals, of both which the said Jennet and 
Ellen did eat, and would have had this examinate, and one Grace 
Bierley, daughter of the said Ellen, to have eaten with them, 
but they refused so to do. And afterward the said Jennet and El- 
len did seethe (boil) the bones of the said child in a pot, and with 
the fat that came out of the said bones they said they would 
anoint themselves, that thereby they might sometimes change 
themselves into other shapes. And after all this being done, 
they said they would lay the bones again in the grave the next 
night following, but whether they did so or not this examinate 
knoweth not ; neither doth she know how they got it out of the 
grave at the first taking of it up." She next staled, that " about 
half a year ago, the said Jennet Bierley, Ellen Bierley, Jane 
Southworth, and this examinate (who went by the appointment 
of the said Jennet, her grandmother), did meet at a place called 
Redbank, upon the north side of the water of Ribble, every 
Thursday and Sunday at night, by the space of a fortnight, and at 
the water-side there came unto them, as they went thither, four 
black things, going upright, and yet not like men in the face, 
which four did carry the said three women and this examinate 
over the water ; and when they came to the said Redbank, they 
found something there which they did eat. . . . And after 
they had eaten, the said three women and this examinate danced, 
every one of them with one of the black things aforesaid." . . 
She proceeded to describe further acts, familiar to those who 
enter into the minutiss of sorcery, and which seem to have been 



THE WITCHES OF SAMLESBURY. 293 

taken from the foreign books on the subject, and then described 
other persecutions to which she had been subjected, until the 
time of the arrest of the prisoners. 

It was not the fashion at this time to submit witnesses in such 
cases to a strict cross-examination, nor did any one think of op- 
ening the grave of the child to ascertain in what condition the 
body might then be ; but Thomas Walshman deposed that his 
child died about the time stated, though he said that it had been 
sick for som.e time. Witnesses were also examined as to Grace 
Sowerbuts' fits, and the father and one or two other witnesses 
gave their evidence in corroboration of her statements. The 
evidence was thus in due order taken, and the jury was no 
doubt ready to give a verdict against the prisoners, when the 
judge, Sir Edward Bromley, demanded of the latter what they 
had to say for themselves. The sequel may be told best in the 
rather dramatic language of the report of the trial. The three 
prisoners, instead of being abashed as persons under such cir- 
cumstances usually v^ere, " hiunbly upon their knees, wdth weep- 
ing tears, desired him for God's cause to examine Grace Sower- 
buts, who set her on, or by whose means this accusation came 
against them. Immediately the countenance of this Grace Sow- 
erbuts changed ; the Avitnesses, being behind, began to quarrel 
and accuse one another. In the -end his lordship examined the 
girl, who could not for her life make any direct answer, but 
strangely amazed, told him she was put to a master to learn, but 
he told her nothing of this. But here, as his lordship's care and 
pains were great to discover the practices of these odious witches 
of the forest of Pendle and other places now upon their trial be- 
fore him, so was he desirous to discover this damnable practice 
to accuse these poor women and bring their lives in danger, and 
thereby to deliver the innocent. And as he openly delivered it 
upon the bench, in the hearing of this great audience, that if a 
priest or Jesuit had a hand in one end of it, there would appear 
to be knavery and practice in the other end of it, and that it might 
the better appear to the whole world, examined Thomas Sower- 
buts what master taught his daughter ; in general terms he 
denied all. The wench had nothing to say, but her master told 
her nothing of that. In the end, some that were present told his 
lordship the truth, and the prisoners informed him how she went 
to learn with one Thompson, a seminary priest, who had in- 
structed and taught her this accusation against them, because 
they were once obstinate papists, and now came to church. 
Here is the discovery of this priest, and of his whole practice. 

25* 



294 SORCERY AND MAGIC 

Still this fire increased more and more, and, one witness accu- 
sing another, all things were laid open at large. In the end, 
his lordship took away the girl from her father, and committed 
her to Mr. Leigh, a very religious preacher, and Mr. Chisnal, 
two justices of the peace, to be carefully examined." 

Grace Sowerbuts now made a full confession ; she declared 
that all she said before had been taught her by the priest ; that 
it was a mere invention ; that her fits were counterfeit : and that 
she had, by her own will, gone into the barn and other places 
where she was found. 

Eight years after this trial, in 1620, occurred a somewhat sim- 
ilar case, Avhich made a great sensation at the time. There was 
at Bilston, in Staffordshire, a poor boy twelve years old, named 
William Percy, the son of a husbandman of that place. One 
day as he was coming home from school, he met an old woman 
whom he had never seen before, but who, as it was afterward 
pretended, was a poor woman of the neighborhood, named Joan 
Cock ; she taxed him that he did not wish her good day, and told 
him that he Avas a foul thing, and that it had been better for him if 
he had saluted her. This was the account which the lad gave, and 
he had no sooner reached home than he was seized with dreadful 
fits. It appears that there were many Roman catholics residing in 
the neighborhood of Bilston, and to some of these the boy's pa- 
rents applied for advice and assistance. As soon as the boy was 
exorcised according to the forms directed by the Romish church, 
he became calm, and in reply to questions put to him, he declared 
that he was bewitched, and that he was possessed by three devils. 
Besides the exorcisms, the priests were very liberal with holy 
water and with holy oil, by the plentiful application of which, 
" with extreme fits and hearings, he brought up pins, wool, 
knotted thread, thrums, rosemary, walnut-leaves, feathers, &c." 
This we learn from the priest, who drew up the account of the 
" miracle," which was afterward printed, and who informs us, 
among other things, that "on Thursday, being Corpus Christi 
day, I came again, and found the child in great extremities. In 
this time he had brought up eleven pins, and a knitting-needle, 
folded up in divers folds, &c. He said the spirit bad him not to 
hearken to me in any case ; that the witch said she would make 
an end of him, &c. I wished him to pray for the witch, which 
he did ; then the child did declare that now he was perfectly 
himself, and desired that his books, pens, ink, deaths, might be 
blessed, wishing his parents, sisters, and brothers, to bless them- 
selves, and become catholics ; out of which faith, by God's grace, 



THE BOY OF BILSTON. 295 

he said, he would never live or die. On Sunday I exorcised him, 
and learned of him, that while puritans were in place, he saw 
the devil assault him in the foinn of a blackbird." 

The boy's fits and trances continued, sometimes apparently 
yielding to the exorcisms of the priests, and then again returning 
as violent as ever. Meanwhile the woman accused of the witch- 
craft by the possessing devils, was arrested and carried before 
the chancellor of the bishop of Litchfield, by whose directions 
William Perry was brought to confront her, when he immediate- 
ly fell into his usual fits, declaring that she was his tormentor. 
On this- evidence she was committed to Stafiord jail, and brought 
to trial on the tenth of August, but the jury, not satisfied with the 
evidence, acquitted her. 

The judges, who seem to have suspected the truth, committed 
the boy to the care of the bishop of Coventry and Litchfield, who 
happened to be present, and he carried him home with him to 
Eccleshall castle. There his fits and convulsions were repeated, 
and the bishop for some time could make nothing of him. At 
length he bethought himself of an experiment which would at 
least satisfy himself. It appears that the trial verse used by the 
priests Avas the first verse of the first chapter of the gospel of St. 
John, the words of which were no sooner commenced than the 
boy was seized with the most violent symptoms. The bishop 
took a Greek testament in his hand, and said to the patient, 
" Boy, it is either thou or the devil that abhorrest those words 
of the gospel, and if it be the devil, he (being so ancient a schol- 
ar as of almost of six thousand years' standing) knows and un- 
derstands all languages, so that he can not but know when I re- 
cite the same sentence out of the Greek text ; but if it be thy- 
self, then art thou an execrable wretch, who plays the devil's part, 
wherefore look to thyself, for now thou art to be put to trial, and 
mark diligently whether it be that same scripture which shall be 
read." Then the bishop read the twelfth verse of the chapter, 
and the boy supposing it was the first, fell into his usual convul- 
sions ; but, after the tit was passed over, and the bishop read the 
first verse, the boy thinking it was some other passage, was not 
aff'ected at all. 

The bishop was thus convinced of the imposture, but there 
were still some extraordinary features about the case which re- 
quired explanation, and he let it go on, that it might be in the end 
more fully exposed. At length a hole was made through the 
partition of the room in which the boy slept, and the bishop 
placed one of his servants secretly to watch. A discovery was 



296 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

thus made which, left no further doubt on the matter, and when 
the boy found himself detected, he changed countenance and 
confessed. The story he told was, that an old man called Thom- 
as, with gray hair and " a cradle of glasse," met him not far from 
his father's house, and, entering into conversation with him, sug- 
gested this imposture as a means of staying from school. He 
then taught him to roll about, groan, cast up his eyes, &c., and 
told him to accuse somebody who was reputed a witch. Some 
papists, he said, recommended him to seek help of the catholic 
priests. When the bishop asked him if he did not design to 
yield to their exorcisms, he replied that he did, but that. he had 
continued the imposture so long, because much people resorted 
to him, and brought him good things, and because he was not 
willing to go to school again. It is not impossible that the 
story of the old man had been suggested by the priests them- 
selves, in order to conceal their own complicity in case of a dis- 
covery of the fraud. 

The dangerous doctrine, v/hich had long before been acted up- 
on in the case of the witches of Warboys, was now widely pro- 
mulgated, that the declaration of the person bewitched, while in 
the fits caused by witchcraft, was sufficient evidence against the 
supposed offender. This was opening a door for the indulgence 
of personal enmity which could not fail to be often taken advan- 
tage of, and such cases appear to have been of very frequent 
occurrence. In Lord Londesborough's volume of manuscripts 
already alluded to, there are the notes of two very curious affairs 
of this kind. The first of these cases occurred in and near Lon- 
don, in the year 1622. The lady Jennings, living at Thistle- 
worth, had a daughter named Elizabeth, of the age of thirteen 
years. One day she was " frighted with the sight of an old 
woman who suddainly appeared to her att the dore and demaund- 
ed a pin of her" — this seems to have been the usual article which 
the witches asked of those they were going to torment — and from 
that time the child suitered from convulsive fits of the most pain- 
ful description. A variety of remedies were tried in vain, and 
in the course of this treatment a woman named Margaret Rus- 
sel, who went by the name of Countess, frequently attended — 
she appears to have been v/ell known at the house, and to have 
interfered with the medical arrangements. On the 25th of April, 
at the end of one of her fits, Elizabeth Jennings utteted the 
names of this woman and three others, and then went on talking 
incoherently, " These have bewitched all my mother's children 
— east, west, north, and south, all these lie — all these are witch- 



COUNTESS ARRESTED. 297 

es. Set up a great sprig of rosemary in the middle of the house 
— I have sent this child to speak to show all these witches. Put 
Countess in prison this child will be well. — If she had been long 
ago, all together had been alive [it appears some other children 
of the lady Jennings had died]. Them she bewitched with a 
catstick — Till then I shall lie in great pain. — Till then by fits I 
shall be in great extremity. — They died in great misery." These 
and some other speeches are duly attested by nine persons, among 
whom was the medical attendant. 

The same day Countess w^as arrested and carried before Sir 
William Slingsby, a justice of the peace, and her account of her- 
self is a curious picture of the time. She said that " yesterday 
she went to Mrs. Dromondbye, in Blacke-and-White-court in the 
Old Baylye, and told her that the lady Jennings had a daughter 
strangely sicke ; Vv'hereuppon the said Dromondbye wished her 
to goe to inquire att Clerkenwell for a minister's v.'ifFe that cold 
helpe people that were sicke, but she must not aske for a witch 
or a cunning woman, but for one that is a phisition v/oman ; and 
there this examinate found her and a woman sitting with her, and 
told her in what case the child was, and she said shee wold 
come this day, but shee ought her noe service, and said she had 
bin there before and left receiptes there, but the child did not 
take them. And she said further, that there was two children 
that the lady Jennins had by this husband that were bewitched 
and dead, for there was controversie betweene two howses, and 
that as long as they dwelt there they cold not prosper, and that 
there shold be noe blessing in that house by this man. And be- 
ing demaunded what she meant by the difference betwixt two 
liowses, she answered it was betwixt the house of God and the 
house of the w^rld ; but being xirged to expresse it better, she 
said wee knewe it well enough — it was the difference betwixt 
Higgins the apothecarie, the next neighbour, and the lady Jen- 
nins. And shee further confesseth that above a moneth agoe she 
v/ent to Mrs. Saxey, in Gunpouder-alley, who was forespoken 
herselfe, and that had a booke that cold helpe all those that were 
forespoken, and that shee wold come and shewe her the booke 
and helpe her under God. And further said to this examinate, 
that none but a seminary preist cold cure her." We have here 
another instance how busy the seminary priests, or Jesuits, were 
in obtruding themselves in such cases. 

Countess was now committed to Nev/gate, and next day new 
revelations were obtained from the bewitched child confirmatory 
of the former accusation. But meanwhile the minister's wife 



298 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

(Mrs. Goodcole), witli her liusband and some friends, went to 
the Old Bailey, and being confronted with the prisoner, the latter 
denied the most important part of what she had said. In fact, 
the accusation seems to have arisen out of a private quarrel, and 
on application to an experienced physician. Dr. Napier, the lady 
Jennings was set at ease as to the ailment of her daughter — so 
we learn from a note at the end of the paper. 

The other case recorded in Lord Londesborough's manuscript 
occurred in 1626, and is still more remarkable. On the 13th of 
August in that year, a man named Edward Bull and a woman 
named Joan Greedie were indicted at Taunton assizes for be- 
witching one Edward Dinham. This man, when in his fits, had 
two voices besides his own, " whereof one is a very pleasant 
voice and shrill, the other deadly and hollow ;" the third was his 
own voice. When the first two (who were good and evil spirits 
that possessed him) spoke, there was no motion of his lips and 
tongue, which however moved as was usual with a man talking 
when his own voice was heard. No doubt he was a ventrilo- 
quist. The dialogue, as taken down in the paper before me, 
bears a close resemblance to the conversations of the possessed 
nuns in France : it is too gross an imposture to deceive any one 
for a moment. (I use good and bad for the two spiritual voices, 
and man for the natural voice, as more simple than the mode of 
expressing them in the manuscript.) The conversation began 
as follows : — 

" Good. Howe comes this man to bee thus tormented ? 

'^ Bad. He is bewitched. 

" Good. Who hath done it ? 

" Bad. That I may not tell. "" 

" Good. Aske him agayne. 

^'Man. Come, come, prithee tell me who hath bewitched me. 

'■^ Bad. A woman in greene cloathes and a blacke hatt, with a 
longe poll ; and a man in gray srite, with blewe stockinges. 

" Good. But where are they 1 

"Bad. Shee is at her house ; and hee is at a tavern e in Yeo- 
hull in Ireland. 

" Good. But what are theire names ? 

''Bad. Nay, that I will not tell. 

" Good. Aske him agayne. 

''Man. Come, come, prithee tell me what are their names. 

"Bad. I am bound not to tell. 

" Good. Then tell half of their names. 

"Bad. The one is Johane, and the other Edward. 



THE BEWITCHING OF EDWARD DINHAM. 299 

" Good. Nowe tell me the other half. 

^'Bad. That I may not. 

" Good. Aske him agayne. 

"Man. Come, come, prithee tell me the other half. 

"Bad. The one is Greedie, and the other Bull." 

Having obtained this information, a messenger was sent to a 
house " suspected," and finding a woman dressed according to 
the description, he caused her to be arrested and committed to 
safe custody. The conversation then v.'eut on as follows : — 

" Good. But are these witches • 

" Bad. Yes, that they are. 

" Good. Howe came they to bee soe 1 

"Bad. By discent. 

" Good. But howe by discent ? 

"Bad. From the grandmother to the mother, and from the 
mother to the children. 

" Good. But howe were they soe ? 

"Bad. They were bound to us, and wee to them. 

" Good. Lett me see the bond. 

" Bad. Thou shalt not. 

" Good. Lett me see it, and if I like I will seale alsoe. 

"Bad. Thou shalt if thou wilt not reveale the contentes 
thereof. 

" Good. I will not." 

The bond is now supposed to be shown, on which the good 
spirit exclaims — 

" Good. Alas ! oh pittifull, pittifull, pittifull ? What ? eight 
seales, bloody scales, four dead and four alive ? ah, miserable ! 

"Man. Come, come, prithee tell me, why did they bewitche 
me 1 

"Bad. Because ihow didst call Johane Greedie witche. 

"Man. Why, is shee not a witche ? 

"Bad. Yes, but thou shouldest not have said soe. 

" Good. But why did Bull bewitche him? 

"Bad. Because Greedie was not stronge enough." 

Inquiry is again made after Bull, and, on following the direc- 
tion given by the spirit, the messenger finds the spot from which 
he had just escaped, and meets with people who had seen him 
running away. A conversation follows on the mischiefs which 
the witches had perpetrated before they attacked this man, and 
we learn that they had bewitched a person to death. The con- 
versation is resumed in another fit six days after and another 
attempt to catch Bull failed. The bad spirit now declares his 



300 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

intention to have Dinliam's soul, but the good spirit opposes him, 
and a violent struggle arises, and the evil one has the advantage. 
The conversation between them is then resinned : — 

" Bad. I will have him, or else I will torment him eight tymes 
more. 

" Good. Thou shalt not have thy will in all thinges ; thou shalt 
torment him but four tymes more. 

" Bad. I will have thy soule. 

" Good. If thou wilt answere me three questions, I will sealo 
and goe with thee. 

'^Bad. I will. 

" Good. Who made the world? 

"Bad. God. 

" Good. Who created mankynde 1 

"Bad. God. 

" Good. Wherefore was Christ Jesus his precious blood shed ? 

" Bad. rie no more of that." 

Upon this, the patient was seized with terrible convulsions. 
A few days afterward, in another fit, the struggle to obtain pos- 
session of the soul is renewed : — 

" Bad. If thou v/ilt give me thy soule, I will give thee gold 
enough. 

" Good. Thy gold will scald ray fingers. 

" Bad. If thou wilt give me thy soule, I will give thee dice, 
and thou shalt winne infinite somes of treasure by play. 

" Good. If thou canst make every letter in this booke [ihe ?nan 
had a prayer-book in his ha?id'\ a die, I vfill. 

" Bad. That I cannott, 

" Good. Laudes, laudes, laudes ! 

"Bad. Ladies, ladies, ladies — thou shalt have ladies enough, 
and if thou wilt they shall come to bedd to thee." [The bad 
/Spirit evidently did not understand Latin !] 

" Good. If thou canst make every letter in this booke a ladie, 
I will." 

The bad spirit now attempted to cast the book away, but after 
a violent struggle he was overcome, and then the good spirit 
made " the sweetest rausicke that ever was heard." After an- 
other attempt to trace and catch Bull, by the spirit's directions he 
Avas at last captured in his bed. Now that the prisoners were 
secured, Dinham was delivered from his persecutor, and was no 
more tormented. The witches were indicted for similar offences, 
but vfe are not told what was their fate, or whether any " semi- 
nary priests" were here concerned. 



COTTA ON WITCHCRAFT. 301 

The influence of the doctrine and example of King James 
might now be considered as passed, and the witchcraft agitation 
would perhaps have gradually subsided, had not a new influence 
arisen to revive the flame. Among the writers on the subject of 
witchcraft during James's reign, one took it up in a more rational 
view than was usual among his contemporaries. This was John 
Cotta, an eminent physician of Northampton, the author of a work 
entitled " The Trial of Witchcraft.'' Cotta did not dispute the 
existence of the witches, but he objected to the evidence which 
was received against ihem ; and the arguments which he used 
to support his opinions would, if followed out, have led him much 
further than he v/ould venture then to go. Cotta requires that 
the evidence against persons accused of witchcraft should be of 
a direct and practical description. He recommended that in all 
cases of supposed witchcraft or possession, skilful physicians 
should be employed to ascertain if the patient might not be suf- 
fering from a natural malady, and he pointed out the fallacy which 
attended the doctrine of vvitches' marks. He showed how little 
faith could generally be placed in the confessions of the witches, 
from both the manner in which they were obtained, and the char- 
acters of the individuals vi'ho made them. He exposed in the 
same rational manner the uncertainty of such objectionable modes 
of trying witches as swimming them in the waters, scratching, 
beating, pinching, or drawing blood from them. He objected 
also to taking the supernatural revelations in those v/ho were be- 
witched as evidence against those v^ho v/ere accused of bewitch- 
ing them. It will be seen that all the evidence at that time con- 
sidered conclusive would thus have been rendered of no account. 
But Cotta was in advance of his age : he published his book in 
1616, when King James's doctrines prevailed in full force, and 
it attracted little attention. A new and much-enlarged edition, 
published in 1624, does not appear to have been much better 
received- — at least it had no effect in checking the persecution to 
which so many unfortunate creatures were exposed. 

26 



302 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

WITCHCRAFT UNDER THE COMMONWEALTH : MATTHEW HOPKINS, 
THE WITCH-FINDER. 

The great witch-persecution in England arose under the com- 
monwealth. The ardent religious feelings of the puritans led 
them to believe not only that they were themselves supported by 
divine inspiration and favored with special revelations, but that 
Satan was as actively at work against them ; and that, as with 
the heroes of the Homeric age, the warfare in which they were 
thrown engaged the spiritual no less than the carnal world. It 
was natural, therefore, that they should look with especial hori'or 
and hostility on that union of Satan and mankind which was em- 
bodied in the witch or sorcerer. They were the more apparent 
manifestations of the devil's own interference in the attempt to 
bring back the double tyranny of kingship and popery. It is 
impossible now to say how far the prosecutions of witches at this 
period belonged to the personal animosities of religious and po- 
litical party, but there can be little doubt that some at least of 
those who suffered were martyrs to their loyalty. The first name 
which ushers in the melancholy list during this period is that of 
Dr. Lamb, who had been the favorite Buckingham's domestic 
magician, and who was torn to pieces by the London mob in 
1640. 

The great outbreak of fanaticism and superstition which fol- 
lowed began in the county of Essex. In the spring of 1645, 
several witches were seized at Manningtree, and were subse- 
quently condemned and hanged. One of these was an old wo- 
ftian named Elizabeth Clarke, and the most important witness 
against her was " Matthew Hopkins of Manningtree, gent." It 
appears that Hopkins had watched with her several nights in a 
room in the house of a Mr. Edwards, in which she was confined, 
to keep her from sleeping until she made a confession, and to 
see if she were visited by her familiars. He declared, among 
other things, that on the night of the 24th of March, which ap- 
pears to have been the third night of watching, after he had re- 
fused to let her call one of her imps or familiars, she confessed 
that about six or seven years before she had surrendered herself 



MATTHEW HOPKINS AND JOHN STERNE. 303 

to the devil, who came to her in the form of " a proper gentle- 
man, with a laced band." Soon after this a little dog appeared, 
fat and short in the legs, in color white with sandy spots, which, 
when he hindered it from approaching her, vanished from his 
sight. She confessed that it was one of her imps, named Jar- 
mara. Immediately after this had disappeared, another came in 
the form of a greyhound, which she called Vinegar Tom ; and 
it Avas followed by another in the shape of a polecat. " And this 
informant [Hopkins] further saith, that going from the house of 
the said Mr. Edwards to his own house about nine or ten of the 
clock that night, with his greyhound with him, he saw the grey- 
hound suddenly give a jump, and run as she had been in a full 
course after a hare ; and that when the informant made haste to see 
what his greyhound so eagerlj'' pursued, he espied a white thing 
about the bigness of a kitlin [kitten], and the greyhound stand- 
ing aloof from it ; and that by-and-by the said white imp or kitten 
danced about the said greyhound, and by all likelihood bit a piece 
of the flesh of the shoulder of the greyhound, for the greyhound 
came shrieking and crying to this informant with a piece of flesh 
torn from her shoulder. And this informant further saith, that, 
coming into his own yard that night, he espied a black thing, 
proportioned like a cat, only it was thrice as big, sitting on a 
strawberry-bed, and fixing its eyes on this informant ; and when 
he went toward it, it leaped over the pale toward this informant, 
as he thought, but ran quite through the yard, with his greyhoimd 
after it, to a great gate, which was underset with a pair of tum- 
brill-strings, and did throw the said gate wide open, and then 
vanished ; and the said greyhound returned again to this inform- 
ant, shaking and trembling exceedingly." 

Hopkins had not ventured to remain with the witch alone in 
his watchings, for he had with him one John Sterne, of Manning- 
tree, who also added " gentleman" to his name, and who con- 
firmed everything that Hopkins had said, deposed to the coming 
of the imps, and adding that the third imp was called Sack-and- 
sugar. They watched at night with another woman, named Re- 
becca West, and saw her imps in the same manner. She con- 
fessed, and stated that the first time she saw Satan, he came to 
her at night, told her he must be her husband, and married her. 
The severe treatment to which the persons accused were exposed 
soon forced confessions from them all, and they avowed them- 
selves guilty of mischiefs of every description, from the taking 
away of human life to the spoiling of milk. Some of their imps 
had caused storms at sea, and thus the ships of people against 



304 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

whom they were provoked were cast away. The names and 
forms of their imps were equally fantastic. Rebecca Jones, a 
witch brought from St. Osythe's, said that she had met a man in 
a ragged suit, with great eyes that terrified her exceedingly, and 
that he gave her three things like moles, but vv^ithout tails, which 
she fed with milk. Another had an imp in the form of a white 
dog, which she called Elimanzer, and which she fed with milk- 
pottage. One had three imps, which she called Prick-ear, Jack, 
and Frog ; another had four, named James, Prick-ear, Robin, and 
Sparrow. Several witnesses — poor and ignorant people — were 
brought to testify to the mischief which had been done by these 
means; and some declared that they had seen theii: imps. A 
countryman gravely related hovi, passing at daybreak by the 
house of one of the women accused, named Anne West, he was 
surprised to find her door open at that early hour, and looking in, 
he saw three or four things like black rabbits, one of which ran 
after him. Pie seized upon it and tried to kill it, but it seemed 
in his hands like a piece of wool, and stretched out in length as 
he pulled it without any apparent injury. Then recollecting 
that there was a spring near at hand, he hurried thither and at- 
tempted to drown it, but it vanished from his sight as soon as he 
put it in the water. Pie then returned toward the house, and 
seeing Anne West standing outside the door in her smock, he 
asked her why she sent her imps to torment him. 

This seems to have been the first appearance of Matthew Hop- 
kins in the character of a v.'itch-finder, for which he afterward 
became so notorious, and which he now assumed as a legal pro- 
fession, lie proceeded in a regular circuit through Sufiblk, Nor- 
folk, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdon, accompanied with John 
Sterne and a woman whose business it was to examine the bodies 
of the females in search of their marks. In August of 1645, we 
find them at Bury, in Suffolk, where, on the 27th of that month, 
no less than eighteen witches were executed at once, and a hun- 
dred and twenty more were to have been tried, but a sudden 
movement of the king's troops in that direction obliged the judges 
to adjourn the session. Some of the imps here appeared in the 
shapes of snakes, v/asps, and hornets, and even of snails. They 
were mostly employed in petty offences ; one man and his wife 
were guilty only of having bewitched the beer in a brewhcuse 
and making it stink. Others, however, confessed that they had 
raised tempests and storms, and caused mischief of a much more 
serious character. One woman declared that she had conceived 
tv/o children by the devil, " but as soon as sho. was delivered of 



PARSON LOWES. 305 

tliem they ran away in most horrid long ugly shapes." Anne 
Leach, of Mistley, Essex, who was tried here, said that the imps 
" did mischief wherever they went, and that when this examinant 
did not send and employ them abroad to do mischief, she had not 
her health, but when they were employed she was healthful and 
well." 

The most remarkable victim of this inquisition at Bury was an 
aged clergjanan named Lowes, who had been vicar of Brandeston 
near Framlingham in that county, fifty years, a well-known op- 
ponent of the new church government. This man, we are told 
by Sterne, one of the inquisitors, "had been indicted for a com- 
mon imbarrator, and for witchcraft, above thirty years before, and 
the grand jury (as I have heard) found the bill for a common im- 
barrator, who now, after he was found with the marks, in his con- 
fession he confessed that in pride of heart to be equal, or rather 
above God, the devil took advantage of him, and he covenanted 
with the devil, and sealed it with his blood, and had those famil- 
iars or spirits, which sucked *on the marks found on his body, 
and did much harm both by sea and land, especially by sea, for 
he confessed, that he being at Lungarfort [Lan guard -fort] in Suf- 
folk, where he preached, as he walked upon the wall or works 
there, he saw a great sail of ships pass by, and that, as they were 
sailing by, one of his three imps, namely, his yellow one, forth- 
with appeared to him and asked him what he should do, and he 
bad it go and sink such a ship, and showed his imp a new ship 
among the middle of the rest (as I remember), one that belonged 
to Ipswich, so he confessed the imp went forthwith away, and 
he stood still and viewed the ships on the sea as they were a 
sailing, and perceived that ship immediately to be in more trou- 
ble and danger than the rest ; for he said the water was more 
boisterous near that than the rest, tumbling up and down with 
waves, as if water had been boiled in a pot, and soon after (he 
said) in a short time it sunk directly down into the sea as he 
stood and viewed it, v/hen all the rest sailed down in safety ; then 
he confessed he made fourteen widows in one quarter of an hour. 
Then Mr. Hopkins, as he told me (for he took his confession), 
asked him, if it did not grieve him to see so many men cast 
away in a short time, and that he should be the cause of so many 
poor widows on a sudden ; but he swore by his Maker, no, he 
was joyful to see what power his imps had : and so likewise 
confessed many other mischiefs, and had a charm to keep him 
out of the jail and hanging, as he paraphrased it himself, but 

26* 



306 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

therein the devil deceived him ; for he was hanged that Michael- 
mas time, 1645, at Bury St. Edmunds ; but he made a very far 
larger confession, which I have heard hath been printed; but if 
it were so, it was neither of Mr. Hopkins' doing nor mine own, 
for we never printed anything until now." 

Perhaps Hopkins, when scared by the royal troops, returned 
homeward from Bury to Ipswich, where a poor woman named 
Lakelaw was burnt on the ninth of September. She confessed 
that she had been a witch nearly twenty years, and that she had 
bewitched to death her own husband and a person who had re- 
fused to give her a needle, besides destroying several ships, yet 
she had always appeared to be a very religious woman, and was 
a constant attendant at church. She had three imps in the shape 
of two little dogs and a mole. 

At Yarmouth, Hopkins sacrificed sixteen persons, all of whom 
made confessions. One woman had been in the habit of doing 
work for one of the aldermen, v.'ho was a stocking merchant. 
One day, when he was absent from home, she went to his house 
to ask for work, and was turned away contemptuously by his man. 
She then applied to the maid-servant for some knitting, but was 
received no more faA'orably. She went home in great distress 
and anger, and in the middle of the night, hearing a knock at the 
door, she rose from her bed to look out at the window, and there 
saw a tall black man. He told her he knew of the ill-treatment 
she had received, and that he was come to give her the means 
of revenge ; and, after having made her write her name in a book 
he drew from his pocket, he gave her some money, and went 
away. Next night he appeared again, and told her he had not 
the power to injure the man because he went regularly to hear 
pious ministers, and said his prayers night and morning ; and it 
was then agreed that he should punish the maid. The night fol- 
lowing he returned with the same story as regarded the maid, 
but he said there was a child in the family that might be injured. 
The woman having consented, he came next night with an image 
of wax intended to represent the child, and they went together 
to the churchyard and buried it. The child was immediately 
taken ill, and it had languished in this condition eighteen months, 
when the witch was seized and brought to the witch-finder's 
"justice." She was taken to the room where the child lay, and 
she had no sooner repeated her confession there, than it began 
to recover. They took the woman next morning to the church- 
yard, Avhere she pointed to the exact spot where the waxen im- 
age was buried, but when they dug they found nothing. The 



THE WITCHES AT FAVERSHAM. 307 

devil it seems, had carried it away. This woman's familiar 
came to her in the shape of a blackbird. 

The infection thus set a going by Hopkins in one part of the 
kingdom, soon spread itself to others, and the whole island seemed 
on a sudden to be filled with malignant witches. In this same 
month of September, 1645, three Avitches were executed at Fa- 
versham, in Kent. They had signed covenants to the evil one 
with their blood. One of them said, that about three quarters of 
a year before, when she first became a witch, " As she was in 
the bed about twelve or one of the clock in the night, there lay a 
ragged soft thing upon her bosom, which was very soft, and she 
thrust it off with her hand ; and .she saith that when she had 
thrust it away, she thought God forsook her, for she could 
never pray so well since as she could before ; and further saith, 
that she verily thinks it was alive." Another, who had been 
twenty years acquainted with a demon which first appeared to 
her in the shape of a hedgehog, but as soft as a cat, " at her first 
coming into the jail spake very much to the others that were ap- 
prehended before her to confess if they were guilty ; and stood 
to it very perversely that she was clear of any such thing, and 
that if they put her into the water to try her she should certainly 
sink. But when she was put into the water, and it was appa- 
rent that she did float upon the water, being taken forth, a gen- 
tleman to whom before she had so confidently spoken, and with 
whom she off'ered to lay twenty shillings to one that she could 
not swim, asked her how it was possible that she could be so 
impudent as not to confess herself, when she had so much per- 
suaded the others to confess ; to whom she answered, that the 
devil went with her all the way, and told her that she should 
sink, but, when she was in the water, he sat upon a cross-beam 
and laughed at her." The third of the Faversham witches, whose 
term of twenty years for which she had sold herself to Satan 
was nearly expired, and whose familiar was a little dog named 
Bun, deposed " that the devil promised her that she should not 
lack, and that she had money sometimes brought to her she knevv 
not whence, sometimes one shilling, sometimes sixpence, never 
more at once." The incapacity of the tempter to give more than 
a small sum of money at a time to any of his victims, was a pe- 
culiar article in the English popular creed. "In 1645," says 
Baxter, " in Dorsetshire, I lodged at a village on a hill, called 
(I think) Evershot, in the house of the minister, a grave man, 
who had with him a son, also a learned minister, that had 
been chaplain to Sir Thomas Adams in London. They both 



308 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

told me, that tliey had a neighbor that had long lain bed-rid, 
that told all the occasion ; that for a long time, being a poor la- 
boring man, every morning when he went out of his door, he 
found a shilling under his door, of which he told no man, so that 
in a long time, he buying some sheep or swine, and seeming rich, 
his neighbors marvelled how he came by it. At last he told them, 
and was suddenly struck lame and bed-rid. They would have 
nie speak with the man ; but the snow covering the ground, and 
I being ill, and the witnesses fully credible, I forbore." 

Hopkins and his colleagues were encouraged in their nev/ 
profession by the tacit recognition of parliament, who sent a com- 
mission of puritanical ministers to assist the judges in the assizes. 
We can trace his course imperfectly by the pamphlets of the time, 
which give reports of at least some of the different trials in which 
he figured as grand accuser, but some of these are now exceed- 
ingly rare, and many no doubt are lost. He was perhaps at Cam- 
bridge tovfard the end of the year 1645, as a witch was hanged 
there who had an imp in the form of a frog. Toward spring the 
witch-finder-general reached Huntingdon, where a rich harvest 
awaited him. 

The imps of the witches of Huntingdon often assumed the 
form of mice, and they were transferable from one person to an- 
other. They had different powers, some being able to kill men, 
others only cattle and animals, while the power of others extend- 
ed only to inanimate things. This was the reason why one witch 
had often several familiars. John Winnick, a husbandman, said 
that having lost his purse with seven shillings in it, at which he 
was much grieved, he was one day at noon in the barn, making 
hay-bottles for horses, " sv/earing, cursing, and raging," and wish- 
ing he might have help to restore his loss, when the evil one ap- 
peared to him in the form of a black shaggy beast, with paws 
like a bear, but not quite so large as a cony or rabbit, and tempt- 
ed him by a promise of restitution. One of the Huntingdon 
witches, Joan Wallis, said that she one day met a man in black 
clothes, who said his name was Blackman, and asked her if she 
was poor. She " saw he had ugly feet," and was afraid. He 
told her that he v/ould send her two familiars named Grissell and 
Greedigut, and " within three or four days Grissell and Greedi- 
gut came to her, in the shape of dogs v;illi great bristles of hog's 
hair upon their backs, and said to her they were come from Black- 
man to do what she would command them, and did ask her if she 
did want anything, and they would fetch her anything ; and she 
said she lacked nothing. Then they prayed her to give them 



JOHN GAULE RE&IgTS HOPKINS, 309 

some victuals, and she said she was poor and had none to give 
them, and so they departed." Yet she confessed that Blaclcman, 
Grissell, and Greedigut, divers times came to her afterward, and 
brought her two or three shillings at a time. Elizabeth Chandler 
was accused of having tvv^o imps named Beelzebub and Trulli- 
bub ; but she denied it, and stated that she called a certain log 
of wood Beelzebub, and a stick near it Trullibub. Another 
woman was constrained to confess that she sent her familiar, 
named Pretty, to kill a man's capons. The man being brought 
■forward as a witness, deposeth, that " she coming to bake a loaf 
at his house about three or four years since, being denied, his 
capons did fall a fluttering, and would never eat after. And also' 
saith, that about the same time, she having a hog in his yard, 
some of his servants set a dog on the same ; for which she said 
she would be reveiiged, and the next day one of his hogs died." 
It was apparently just before his visit to Huntingdon to under- 
take these examinations, which took place during the months of 
March and April of the year 1646, that Hopkins went to Kimbol- 
ton. The reports of his sanguinary proceedings had spread con- 
sternation far and wide, and it was only here and there that any 
one durst raise a voice against him. One of these courageous 
individuals was John Gaule, the minister of Great Staughton, 
near Kirabolton, in Huntingdonshire, who took up the cudgels 
against Hopkins, and provoked his wrath to such a degree, that 
he wrote the following insolent letter to one of the chief persons 
in his parish. " My service to your worship presented, I have 
this day received a letter to come to a town called Great Staugh- 
ton, to search for evil-disposed persons called witches (though I 
hear your minister is against us through ignorance), I intend to 
come (God willing) the sooner to hear his singular judgment in 
behalf of such parties. I have known a minister in Suflolk 
preach as much against the discovery in a pulpit, and forced to 
recant it (by the committee) in the same place. I much marvel 
such evil members should have any, much more any of the cler- 
gy who should daily preach terror to convince such offenders, 
stand up to take their parts against such as are complainants for 
the king and sufferers themselves with their families and estates. 
I intend to give yolir town a visit suddenly. I am to come to 
Kimbolton this week, and it shall be ten to one but I will come 
to your town first ; but I would certainly know afore whether 
your town affords many sticklers for such cattle, or willing to 
give and afford us good welcome and entertainment, as other 
where I have been, else I shall waive your shire (not as yet be- 



310 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

ginning in any part of it myself), and betake me to snch places 
Avhere I do and may persist without control, but with thanks and 
recompense. So I humbly take my leave, and rest your servant 
to be commanded. " Matthew Hopkins." 

So far was John Gaule from being terrified by this threatening 
epistle, that he immediately made it the text of a treatise against 
the witch-finder and his followers, which he published the same 
year under the title of " Select Cases of Conscience touching 
Witches and Witchcraft." Gaule was not in advance of his age 
in point of intelligence, though his better and more generous 
feelings revolted at the Avholesale cruelties which had been pro- 
voked by Hopkins and his accomplices. He fully believed in 
the existence of the witches, and in the evils which they perpe- 
trated, but he wished like Cotta, that the evidence should be more 
cautiously sifted and discriminated. In his enumeration of the 
objectionable methods of trying witches, he lets us into a secret 
of Hopkins's practices, which show us at once the horrible char- 
acter of the persecution that was carried on under the direction 
of the witch-finder-general. " To all these signs," says Gaule, 
I can not but add one at large, which I have lately learned, part- 
ly from some communications I had with one of the witch-find- 
ers (as they call them), partly from the confessions (which I 
heard) of a suspected and committed witch, so handled as she 
said, and partly as the country people talk of it. Having taken 
the suspected witch, she is placed in the middle of a room, upon 
a stool or table, cross-legged, or in some other uneasy posture, to 
which, if she submits not, she is then bound with cords ; there she 
is watched and kept without meat or sleep for the space of four- 
and-twenty hours (for they say within that time they shall see 
her imp come and suck). A little hole is likewise made in the 
door for the imp to come in at ; and lest they should come in 
some less discernible shape, they that watch are taught to be 
ever and anon sweeping the room, and if they see any spiders 
or flies, to kill them, and if they can not kill them, then they may 
be sure they are her imps." 

The provision of making a hole in the door shows no very 
intelligent appreciation of the nature of spirits, but it agrees tol- 
erably well with the confessions of several of Hopkins's victims. 
Elizabeth Clark, at Manningtree, is said to have confessed that 
when the devil visited her at night, she was obliged to rise and 
let him in when he knocked at the door. One witch kept her 
imp a year and a half with oatmeal, and then lost it. Another 
killed her imp ; and another had imps which sucked one another. 



MATTHEW HOPKINS AT WORCESTER. 311 

The hon-or at first excited by the atrocities committed under 
the regime of the witch-finder-general soon gave place to a wide- 
ly-extended feeling of indignation. A lady who lived near 
Hoxne in Suflblk, told Dr. Hutchinson (the author of the Essay 
on Witchcraft) that when the witch-finders came into that neigh- 
borhood, they took a poor woman, and by keeping her fasting 
and without sleep, induced her to confess that she had an imp 
named Nan. " This good gentlewoman told me that her hus- 
band (a very learned and ingenious gentleman) having indigna- 
tion at the thing, he and she went to the house, and put the peo- 
ple out of doors, and gave the poor w^oman some meat, and let 
her go to bed ; and when she had slept and come to herself she 
knew not what she had confessed, and had nothing she called 
Nan but a pullet, that she sometimes called by that name." 
Tortures like these, and even worse, were exercised on Parson 
Lowes of Brandeston, to force a confession from him. Dr. 
Hutchinson learned "from them that watched with him, that 
they kept him awake several nights together, and run him back- 
ward and forward about the room, until he was out of breath; 
then they rested him a little, and then ran him again ; and thus 
they did for several days and nights together, till he was weary 
of his life, and was scarce sensible of what he said or did. 
They swam him at Framlingham, but that was no true rule to 
try him by ; for they put in honest people at the same time, and 
they swam as well as he." 

To escape the odium which pursued him through the counties 
in which he had made himself so conspicuous, Hopkins appears 
to have now removed the scene of his labors into other parts of 
the kingdom. We find him not long after this at Worcester. 
On the fourth of March, probably of the year 1647, four witches 
were condemned in that city, and Matthew Hopkins was one of 
the principal witnesses. After the same process of watching 
her, he extracted from one of them a confession that Satan had 
appeared to her as a handsome young man, that he said he came 
to marry her, and that he accordingly took her as his wife. An- 
other said that she only enjoyed her health while her imp was 
employed in doing mischief. These were imitations of the con- 
fessions made in Essex and Suflblk. The witches atW^orcester 
said they tormented and killed people by making figures of wax, 
and sticking pins and needles into them. On their trial, one of 
them denied their confession, and said that when they confessed 
they were not in their senses. 

On his return to his native county, Hopkins was assailed on 



312 SORCERY AND MAGIO. 

every side by the outcries of his enemies, and he was alarmed 
at the indignation his cruelties had excited. The extraordinnry 
scale on which he had carried on his prosecutions, gave rise to 
a popular report that he was not himself unacquainted with Satan, 
from whom it was pretended by some that he had obtained the 
list of his subjects. Complaints had been publicly made against 
him, and his method of proceeding was laid aside as too rigorous 
and tyrannical. la fact, a great reaction had followed him in 
his course, and the witch-finder was now in disgrace. Hopkins 
felt this, and winced under the popular attacks. It appears that 
he was of a weak constitution, and vexation and regret hastened 
the hereditary consumption to which he was a prey. He re- 
turned to MEinningtree in 1647, printed a pamphlet in his own 
defence,* and then died. This we learn from his coadjutor 
Sterne, who assures us that he had " no trouble of conscience 
for what he had done, as was falsely reported of him." A re- 
port was afterward circulated, apparently without any foundation 
in truth, although adopted by Butler, that in the midst of the 
popular indignation against the witch-finder, some gentlemen 
had seized on him and put him to the trial of swimming, on 
which, as he happened to swim, he was adjudged to be himself 
a wizard. t Upon the death of Hopkins, the popular odium seems 
to have fallen on his colleague Sterne, who had taken up his 
residence at Lawshall, near Bury St. Edmonds. In 1648, pro- 
voked by the reflections that had been cast on himself and his 

* " The Discovery of Witclies, in answer to several queries lately delivered to 
the judge of assize for the county of Norfolk ; and was published by Matthew 
Hopkins, 'witch-fiuder, for the benefit of the whole kingdom. Printed lor R. Roy- 
ston, at the Angel, in Iron Lane, 1647." This is a very rare tract, and the only 
copy I know of was in the possession of Sir Walter Scott, from whose '• Letters 
on Demonology and Witchcraft," 1 take tiie title, 
t The lines of Hudibras have been often quoted :— 

Hath not this present parliament 

A lieger to the devil sent, 

Fully empowered to set about 

Finding revolted witches out ? 

And has he not within a year 

Hanged threescore of them in one shire ? 

Some only for not being drowned, 

And some for sitting above ground 

Whole days and nights upon their breeches, 

And feeling pain, were hanged for witches. 

And some for putting knavish tricks 

Upon green geese or Turkey chicks 

Or pigs that suddenly deceased 

Of griefs unnatural, as he guessed, 

Who proved himself at length a witch, 

And made a rod for his own breech. 

Hudibras, Part ii., Canto 3, 



THE OLD WOMAN OF DROITWITCH. 313 

colleague Hopkins, he published a defence of their conduct, un- 
der the title of " A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft," 
in which he boasts that he had been part an agent in convicting 
about two hundred witches in Essex, Suffolk, Northamptonshire, 
Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and 
the Isle of Ely. He assures us " that in many places I never 
received penny as yet, nor any am like, notwithstanding I have 
hands for satisfaction, except I should sue ; but many rather fall 
upon me for what hath been received, but I hope such suits will 
be disannulled, and that where I have ^been out of moneys for 
towns in charges and otherwise, such course will be taken that 
I may be satisfied and paid with reason."* Hopkins himself, 
in defending himself against the charge of interestedness, tells 
us that his regular charge was twenty shillings for each town, 
including the expenses of living, and journeying thither and 
back. In his book, he confesses that besides the other prac- 
tices of stripping the victims naked, and thrusting pins into va- 
rious parts of their body, in search of marks, and swimming them, 
he had practised the new torture of keeping them awake, and 
forcing them to walk, which was an invention of his own ; but 
he acknowledges that he had been so far obliged to yield to pub- 
lic opinion in the -latter part of his course, as to lay aside this 
his own favorite remedy. 

The violent persecution excited by Hopkins had now subsi- 
ded, and it was followed by a calm, during which we hear but 
little of accusations of witchcraft. The independents, who had 
gained the ascendency, seem to have discouraged prosecutions 
of this kind. Yet, in 1649, soon after the execution of the king, 
we perceive an inclination to revive the prosecutions against 
witches. In the May of that year, the city of Worcester was 
again the scene of a tragedy of this kind. A boy, at Droitwich, 
whose mother, a poor woman, had a cow that had strayed, was 
sent in search of it. As he came near a brake, he thought he 
saw the bulrushes move in one place, and imagining the cow 
might be grazing among them, he approached the spot ; but he 
had no sooner come near, than an old woman suddenly jumped 
up and cried " boh !" The lad was seized with sudden terror, 
became speechless, and hurried home in a state of distraction. 
He remained in the house till the evening, and then he was 
seized with a sudden fit, ran out, and directed his steps toward 

* A copy of tliis excessively rare book is in the rich libraiy of works on demon- 
ology of Mr. James Crossley of Manchester. I only know it through the extracts 
given in that geutlemau's recent edition of Potts' Discovery of Witches. 

27 



314 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

the house of Sir Richard Barret, where, as was usual in the 
olden time, a number of poor people were collected at the door 
feeding upon the charity of the family. Among these the lad 
discovered the old woman of the brake, who it appears was a 
vagrant from Lancashire, sitting down and supping upon a mess 
of hot pottage, and he ran furiously at her, threw her pottage in 
her face, and struck her. The people who stood round inter- 
fered, and, when the state of the case was known, the old wo- 
man was taken and committed to the prison, which was there 
called the " Chequer." , About the middle of the night, the boy's 
mother heard a noise above her, and hurried up to the garret 
where the boy slept, where she found him out of bed, with the 
leg of a stool in his hand, striking furiously at the v/indow. He 
then put on his clothes, ran down into the street, and went direct 
to the prison. It appears that in the meantime the jailer, who 
compassionated the sufferings of the boy, had threatened his 
prisoner that she should have nothing to eat until she had said 
the Lord's prayer and a blessing on her victim, which with 
some difficulty she v/as prevailed upon to do. The consequence 
of this was, that when the boy arrived at the prison, he had re- 
covered his speech, and was enabled to ask the jailer why he 
had allowed his prisoner to go at large. The jailer insisted that 
she was safe under lock and key. " Nay," replied the boy, " I 
have just seen her myself," and he proceeded to tell him how the 
old woman had come in at his window while he was in bed, and 
how he had jumped up and struck her two blows with a stool-leg 
as she was making her exit, which must have left their marks 
on her body. A woman was sent to examine the prisoner's per- 
son, and to her great astonishment she found distinct marks of 
blows, just as the boy had described them. These circum- 
stances were deposed to at the assizes at Worcester, by the boy, 
his mother, the jailer, and the woman who searched, and the 
witch of course stood duly convicted. About the same time a 
man at Tewkesbury had a sow with a numerous litter of pigs, 
and was surprised at the short allowance of milk she gave to 
them. Suspecting there might be something wrong, he watched 
at night, and saw a black thing like a polecat come and suck 
the old sow greedily. He immediately struck at the depreda- 
tor with a fork he held in his hand, and stuck the prongs into 
its thigh ; but it made its escape through the door, and he lost 
sight of it. He followed, however, in the direction which he 
supposed it had taken, and meeting with a man he knew, asked 
him if he had not seen such an animal as he described. The 



THE DISTURBANCES AT WOODSTOCK. 315 

man declared lie had seen nothing but a " wench," who passed 
him apparently in great haste. This wench was taken and ex- 
amined, and the wounds caused by the prongs of the fork were 
found on her thigh. She was taken to Gloucester, and at the 
next assizes tried and convicted. In the month of July follow- 
ing, a man and woman v\'ere executed at St. Albans ; the man 
confessed he had been a witch sixty years, and that he had gen- 
erally exercised his profession as a white or beneficent witch. 
He was probably one of those miserable impostors Avho gained 
their living by conjuring to cure diseases, and help people to 
what was lost or stolen. His accom.plice was a kinswoman, 
who lived with him, and had a familiar in the shape of a cat. 
She acknowledged that this familiar had promised to bring her 
anything she wanted, except money. They said there were 
plenty of other witches about the neighborhood, and accused 
several persons by name. 

This year, however, witnessed a much more remarkable af- 
fair than any of these, and one which made a considerable sen- 
sation. It has gained in modern times an additional importance 
from the circumstance that the great historical novelist. Sir 
Walter Scott, has made it the foundation of one of his ro- 
mances. I shall give it nearly in the words of the report writ- 
ten at or near the time. 

After Charles's death, the royal property Vvas confiscated to 
the state, and commissioners were appointed by parliament to 
survey and sell the crown lands. Among the royal estates was 
the manor of Woodstock, of which the parliamentary commis- 
sioners were sent to take possession in the month of October, 
1649. The more fanatical part of the opponents of royalty had 
always taught that, through witches and otherwise, the devil was 
actively engaged in the service of their opponents, battling 
against them ; and they now found him resolved upon more 
open hostilities than ever. On the third of October, the com- 
missioners, with their servants, went to the manor-hall, and took 
up their lodgings in the king's own rooms, the bed-chamber and 
withdrawing-room : the former they used as their kitchen, the 
council-hall was their brewhouse, the chamber of presence 
served as their place of sitting to despatch business, and the 
dining-room was used as a woodhouse, where they laid the 
wood of " that ancient standard in the high park, known of all 
by the name of the king's oak, which (that nothing might re- 
main that had the name of king affixed to it) they digged up by 
the roots." 



316 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

On the 14th and 15th of October they had little disturbance ; 
but on the 16th there came, as they thought, something into the 
bed-chamber, where two of the commissioners and their servant 
lay, in the shape of a dog, which going under their bed, did, as 
it were, gnaw their bed-cords ; but on the morrow finding them 
whole, and a quarter of beef which lay on the ground untouched, 
they " began to entertain other thoughts." October 17. — Some- 
thing, to their thinicing, removed all the wood of the king's oak 
out of the dining-room to the presence-chamber, and hurled the 
chairs and stools up and down that room ; from whence it came 
into the two chambers where the two commissioners and their 
servants lay, and hoisted up their bed feet so much higher than 
their heads, that they thought they should have been turned over 
and over, and then let them fall down wath such force, that their 
bodies rebounded from the bed a good distance ; and then shook 
the bedsteads so violently, that they declared their bodies were 
sore with it. On the 18th, something came into the chamber 
and walked up and down, and fetching the warming-pan out of 
the withdrav/ing-room, made so much noise that they thought 
fire-bells could not have made more. Next day trenclaers were 
thrown up and down the dining-room, and at those who slept 
there ; one of them being wakened, put forth his head to see 
what was the matter, and had trenchers thrown at him. On the 
20th, the curtains of the bed in the withdrawing-room were 
drawn to and fro ; the bedstead was much shaken, and eight 
great pewter dishes and three dozen of trenchers thrown about 
the bedchamber again. This night they also thought a whole 
armful of the wood of the king's oak was thrown down in their 
chamber, but of that in the morning they found nothing had been 
moved. On the 21st, the keeper of their ordinary and his bitch 
lay in one of the rooms with them, and on that night they were 
not disturbed at all. But on the 22d, though the bitch slept 
there again, to which circumstance they had ascribed their for- 
mer night's rest, both they and it were in " a pitiful taking," the 
latter " opening but once, and then with a whining fearful yelp." 
October 23. — They had all their clothes plucked oif them in the 
withdrawing-room, and the bricks fell out of the chimney into 
the room. On the 244h, they thought in the dining-room that all 
the wood of the king's oak had been brought thither, and thrown 
down close by their bed-side, which being heard by those of the 
withdrawing-room, " one of them rose to see what was done, 
fearing indeed his fellow-commissioners had been killed, but 
found no such matter. Whereupon returning to his bed again, 



THE DISTURBANCES AT WOODSTOCK. 317 

he found two or three dozen of trenchers thrown into it, and 
handsomely covered with the bed-clothes." 

The commissioners persisted in retaining possession, and 
were subjected to new persecutions. On the 25th of October 
the curtains of the bed in the withdrawing-room were drawn to 
and fro, and the bedstead shaken, as before ; and in the bed- 
chamber, glass flew aboiit so thick (and yet not one of the cham- 
ber-windows broken), that they thought it had rained money ; 
whereupon they lighted candles, but " to their grief they found 
nothing but glass." On the 29th something going to the window 
opened and shut it, then going into the bed-chamber, it threw 
great stones for half an hour's time, some whereof fell on the 
high-bed, others on the truckle-bed, to the number in all of aboA^e 
fourscore. This night there was also a very great noise, as if 
forty pieces of ordnance had been shot off together. It aston- 
ished all the neighborhood, and it was thought it must have been 
heard a great way off. During these noises, which were heard 
in both rooms together, the commissioners and their servants 
were struck with so great horror, that they cried out one to an- 
other for help ; whereupon one of them recovering himself out 
of a " strange agony" he had been in, snatched a sword, and had 
like to have killed one of his brethren coming out of his bed in 
his shirt, whom he took for the spirit that did the mischief. 
However, at length they got all together, yet the noise contin- 
ued so great and terrible, and shook the walls so much, that 
they thought the whole manor would have fallen on their heads. 
At the departure of the supernatural disturber of their repose, 
" it took all the glass of the windows away with it." On the 
first of November, something, as the commissioners thought, 
walked up and down the withdrawing-room, and then made a 
noise in the dining-room. The stones which were left before, 
and laid up in the withdrawing-room, were all fetched away this 
night, and a great deal of glass (not like the former) thrown 
about again. 

On the second of November, there came something into the 
withdrawing-room, treading, as they conceived, much like a bear, 
which began by walking about for a quarter of an hour, and then 
at length it made a noise about the table and threw the warming- 
pan so violently that it was quite spoiled. It threw also a glass 
and great stones at the commissioners again, and the bones of 
horses ; and all so violently, that the bedstead and the walls were 
bruised by them. That night they planted candles all about the 
rooms, and made fires up to the " rantle-trees" of the chimney, 

27* 



318 SOKCERY AND MAGIC. 

but all were put out, nobody knew how, the fire and burnt wood be- 
ing thrown up and down the room ; the curtains were torn with the 
rods from their beds, and the bed-posts pulled away, that the tes- 
ter fell down upon them, and the feet of the bedstead were cloven 
into two. The servants in the truckle-bed, who lay all the time 
sweating for fear, were treated even worse, for there came upon 
them first a little which made them begin to stir, but before they 
could get out, it was followed by a whole tubful, as it were, of 
stinking ditch water, so green, that it made their shirts and sheets 
of that color too. The same night the windows were all broke 
by throwing of stones, and there was most terrible noises in 
three several places together near them. Nay, the very rabbit- 
stealers who were abroad that night were so affrighted with the 
dismal thundering, that for haste they left their ferrets in the 
holes behind them, beyond Rosamond's well. Notwithstanding 
all this, one of them had the boldness to ask, in the name of God, 
what it was, what it would have, and what they had done that 
they should be so disturbed after this manner. To which no 
answer was given, but the noise ceased for a while. At length 
it came again, and, as all of them said, brought seven devils worse 
than itself. Whereupon one of them lighted a candle again, and 
set it between the two chambers in the doorway, on which an- 
other fixing his eyes saw the similitude of a hoof, striking the 
candle and candlestick into the middle of the bed-chamber, and 
afterward making three scrapes on the snuff to put it out. Upon 
this, the same person was so bold as to draw his sword, but he 
had scarce got it out, but there was another invisible hand had hold 
of it too, and tugged with him for it ; and prevailing, struck him 
so violently, that he was stunned with the blow. Then began 
violent noises again, insomuch that they, calling to one another, 
got together, and went into the presence-chamber, where they 
said prayers, and sang psalms ; notwithstanding all which, the 
thundering noises still continued in other rooms. After this, on 
the third of November, they removed their lodging over the gate ; 
and next day, being Sunday, went to Ewelm, " where, how they 
escaped the authors of the relation knew not, but returning" on 
Monday, the devil (for that was the name they gave their nightly 
guest) left them not unvisited, nor on the Tuesday following, 
which was the last day they stayed." The courage even of the 
devout commissioners of the parliament was not proof against 
a persecution like this, and the manor of Woodstock was relieved 
from their presence. It is said that one of the old retainers of 
the house, years afterward, confessed that he had entered the ser- 



A WITCH-FINDER AT NEWCASTLE. 319 

vice of the commissioners, in order by playing these tricks upon 
them, which he was enabled to do by his intimate acquaintance 
with the secret passages of the lodge, to rescue it from their 
grasp. 

Hopkins and Sterne were not without their imitators in other 
parts of the country. About the end of the year of which we 
have just been speaking, the magistrates of Newcastle-upon- 
Tyne were alarmed at the reports of witches in that town, and 
they sent into Scotland for a practiser in the art of discovering 
them. They agreed to pay his travelling expenses, and give 
him twenty shillings for every witch who should be convicted — 
an excellent method of increasing their number. No sooner was 
the Scotchman arrived in Newcastle, than the bellman was sent 
round the town to invite all persons to bring their complaints 
against women suspected, and about thirty were brought to the 
town-hall, and subjected, in the sight of all the people collected 
there, to his examination. We are told that his practice was to 
lay the body of the person suspected naked to the waist, and then 
run a pin into her thigh, after which he suddenly let her coats 
fall, and asked her if she had nothing of his in her body which 
did not bleed ; the woman was hindered from replying by shame 
and fear, and he immediately took out the pin and set her aside 
as a convicted witch. Ey this atrocious process, he ascertained 
that twenty-seven persons were practisers of sorcery, and at the 
ensuing assizes fourteen women and a man v.'ere found guilty 
and 'executed. The names of the sufferers are recorded in the 
register of the parish'of St. Andrev/'s. 

Just at the time when the commonwealth was merging into 
the protectorate, in the years 1652, '53, we find cases of witch- 
craft becoming suddenly more numei'ous, or, which is perhaps 
nearer the truth, there were for some cause or other more print- 
ed reports of them. In the former year a witch was hanged at 
Worcester. On the 11th of April, 1652, one Joan Peterson, 
known as the witch of Wapping, was hanged at Tyburn. She 
lived in Spruce island, near Shadwell, and was said to have done 
on the whole more good than harm, for she practised chiefly as 
a white v/itch. Strange things, however, were told of her. A 
man deposed that he was sitting with her in her house and saw 
her familiar, in the shape of a black dog, come in and suck her. 
And two women said that, as they were watching with a child 
of one of their neighbors that was strangely distempered, " about 
midnight they espied (to their thinking) a great black cat come to 
the cradle's side and stopped the cradling, whereupon one of the 



320 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

women took np the fire-fork to strike at it, and it immediately 
vanished. About an hour alter the cat came again to the cradle 
side ; whereupon the other woman kicked at it, but it presently 
vanished, and that leg that she kicked with began to swell and 
be very sore, whereupon they were both afraid, and calling upon 
the master of the house, took their leave. As they were going 
to their own homes, they met a baker, who was likewise a neigh- 
bor's servant, who told them that he saw a great black cat that 
had so frightened him that his hair stood an end ; whereupon the 
women told him what they had seen, who said he thought in his 
conscience that Peterson had bewitched the aforesaid child, for 
(quoth the baker), ' I met the witch a little before going down the 
island.' " The baker gave his testimony in court, and when asked 
by the judge the very pertinent question, " whether he had not 
at other times as well as that been afraid of a cat, he answered 
no, and that he never saw such a cat before, and hoped in God 
he should never see the like again." 

On the 30th of July, 1652, no less than six witches were con- 
demned at Maidstone, in Kent. In addition to the usual circum- 
stances in such cases, they confessed that the devil had given 
them a piece of flesh, " which, whensoever they should touch 
they should thereby effect their desires ; that this flesh lay hid 
among grass, in a certain place which she named, where upon 
search it was found accordingly." The flesh was brought into 
court as an evidence against them, and the author of the printed 
report informs us that it " was of a sinewy substance, and 
scorched, and was seen and felt by this obftervator, and reserved 
for public view at the sign of the Swan, in Maidstone." Other 
witches were brought to trial, and some found guilty, but four only 
were hanged. " Some the're were that wished rather they might 
be burnt to ashes ; alleging, that it was a received opinion among 
many that the body of a witch being burnt, her blood is prevent- 
ed thereby from becoming hereditary to her progeny in the same 
evil, while by hanging it is not ; but whether this opinion be er- 
roneous or not, I," says the narrator, " am not to dispute." 

The following year (1653) witnessed the execution at Salis- 
bury, of a woman who had been in her younger days the servant 
of the famous Dr. Lamb. Her name was Anne Bodenham, and 
she appears to have been initiated into Lamb's practices, and to 
have settled at Salisbury in the character of a wise woman. 
She helped people to recover things stolen, cured diseases, and 
seems to have carried on the practice of poisoning. Many of 
those charged with the crime of witchcraft appear to have been. 



SIR ROBERT FILMOR. 321 

secret possessors of the art of poisoning. The depositions 
against Anne Bodenhain were of a remarivable character. It 
appe-ars that a little girl had been bewitched, and the wise woman 
Bodenham was accused of being in some way or other concerned 
in it. A servant-girl was sent to consult her, and she deposed 
that Anne Bodenham, haidng taken her into a room in her house, 
made a circle on the tloor and carefully swept the space within 
it. She then looked in a glass, and in a book, uttering certain 
mysterious Avords, and placed an earthen pan full of coals in the 
middle of the circle. Five spirits then appeared in the shape 
of ragged boys, and at the same there arose a high wind which 
shook the house. She gave the spirits crumbs of bread, which 
they picked from the floor and ate, and then, after they had all 
leaped over the panof coals, they danced with the witch and the 
maid-servant. The latter had witnessed this scene more than 
once, and on one occasion she was carried to a meadow at Wil- 
ton to gather vervain and dill. She declared that she had seen 
Anne Bodenham transform herself into a great black cat. 

The improvement in intelligence and liberality under the pro- 
tectorate is shown by the publication of two treatises, which 
contained the boldest protests against the iniquity of the witch 
persecution that had appeared since the days of Reginald Scott. 
The trials at Maidstone in 1653 had so much shocked the good 
sense of some of the gentlemen of Kent, that it produced from 
one of them, Sir Robert Filmor, a tract entitled, " An Advertise- 
ment to the Jurymen of England, touching Witches," in which 
he pointed out the ridiculous absurdity of the proofs by which 
this class of offenders were usually convicted. " The late ex- 
ecution of witches at the summer assizes in Kent," he says, 
" occasioned this brief exercitation, which addresses itself to 
such as have not deliberately thought upon the great difficulty 
ill discovering what or who a witch is. To have nothing but 
the public faith of ihe present age, is none of the best evidence, 
unless the universality of elder times do concur with these doc- 
trines, Avhich ignorance in the times of darkness brought forth, 
and credulity in these days of light hath continued." Language 
like this must have sounded strange within six or seven years 
after the fury of persecution which had been excited by Mat- 
thew Hopkins; yet in this spirit Filmor proceeds calmly to con- 
sider and refute each of the reasons on- which the witch-finders 
depended, ending with the crowning proof supposed to be de- 
rived from the devil himself declaring against his victims, 
" which, how it can be well done, except the devil be bound 



322 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

over to give in evidence against the witch, can not be nncler- 
stood." 

This book, which marked the commencement of the protecto- 
rate, was published anonymously ; but two years after, in 1655, 
a minister of the name of Thomas Ady put forth in the same, or 
even in a more enlightened, spirit, a book entitled, " A Candle 
in the Dark, or a treatise concerning the nature of w^itches and 
witchcraft ; being advice to judges, sheriffs, justices of the 
peace, and grand jurymen, what to do before they pass sen- 
tence on such as are arraigned for their lives as witches." 
Ady has enlivened his book with a variety of anecdotes and 
scraps of information relating to the popular superstitions of the 
dajr, and in speaking of charms, which he regards as mere rel- 
ics of popery, he gives the following as the most approved rem- 
edy against the bewitching of milk when it will not work prop- 
erly in the churn. The maid, while churning, was to repeat the 
words : — 

Come, butter, come ; come, butter, come ; 
Peter stands at the gate, 
Waiting for a buttered cake ; 
Come, butter, come. 

This, Ady says, was told by an old witch who declared that her 
grandmother had learned it in the good days of Queen Mary. 

The reign of the protector Oliver was certainly not favorable 
to the persecution of witches. Yet two persons, a mother and 
daughter, were hanged at Bury St. Edmonds, about the year 
1655, and in the November of 1657 a rather remarkable case 
occurred at Shepton Mallet in Somersetshire. A vt^oman named 
Jane Brooks was accused of bewitching a boy named Jones, by 
giving him an apple, Avhich he roasted and ate. He was imme- 
diately seized with strange fits, and v.'hile under their influence 
he cried out against Jane Brooks and her sister as the cause of 
his suffering. It was deposed at the trial that, one Sunday 
afternoon, in company with his father and a cousin named Gib- 
son, he v/as suddenly visited with a fit, and he said that he saw 
Jane Brooks against the wall of the room, pointing to the spot 
where he pretended she stood. Gibson took up a knife and 
struck at the part of the wall to which the boy pointed, and the 
latter immediately exclaimed, " Oh, father! Cousin Gibson hath 
cut Jane Brook's hand,~^and it is bloody!" They immediately 
took a constable, and went with him to the woman's house, 
where they found her silting on a stool, with her hands before 
her, one placed on the other. The constable inquired how she 



A REPUBLICAN WITCH. 323 

did, and she replied, not well. He then asked her why she 
sat in that position, with her hands before her, to which she re- 
plied that it was her wont to do so. When he asked further if 
nothing ailed her hand, she said, " No, it was well enough." 
Still not satisfied, he forced one hand from under the other, and 
found it bleeding just as the boy had described. On being asked 
how this happened, she said she had scratched her hand with a 
great pin.* This was sufficient matter for carrying the woman 
to prison. It was pretended that the boy was often lifted about 
in an extraordinary manner ; and one woman declared that oil 
the 25th of February, 1658, being seized with one of his fits 
while in her house, he went out of the house into the garden, 
and she followed him. There she saw him gradually lifted up 
into the air, and pass away over a wall, 3.nd she saw no more 
of him till he was found lying at the door of a house at some 
distance, when he declared that he had been carried there by 
Jane Brooks. She was tried at Chard assizes, on the 26th of 
March, 1658, and, as might be expected from such conclusive 
evidence, condemned. 

About the period of the protector's death, a witch was hanged 
at Norwich, and sevei'al punished in the same way in Cornwall ; 
and in 1659, two were hanged at Lancaster, who protested their 
innocence to the last. The approach of a great political change, 
and the animosities of party which attended it, always furnished 
the opportunity, even in humble life, of gratifying personal re- 
sentments ; and we shall find immediately after the restoration 
that the cases of witchcraft were again numerous. At the be- 
ginning of the period of the interregnum, the devil was the ene- 
my of the republicans — at its close he v/as opposed to the roy- 
alists. On the 14th of May, 1660, four persons at Kiddermin- 
ster, a widow, her two daughters, and-a man, were charged with 
various acts of witchcraft, and carried to Worcester jail. The 
eldest daughter was accused of saying that, if they had not been 
taken, the king should never have come to England, " and, 

*ThefollowiQg story is given in Dr. Hntcliinsbii's Historical Essay on Witch- 
craft : " Abont the year 1645, there was at Chehi:!srord an afflicted person, that in 
her fits cried ont against a ■woman, a neighbor which Mr. Clark, the minister of the 
gospel there, could not believe to be guilty of such a crime. And it happened, vi'hile 
that woman milked her cow, the cow struck her with one horn upon the fore- 
head, and fetched blood ; and while she was thus bleeding, a spectre in her likenesa 
appeared to the person affiicted, who, pointing at the spectre, one struck at the place, 
and the afflicted said, '-You have made her forehead bleed.' Hereupon some 
went to the woman, and found her forehead bloody, and acquainted Mr. Clark 
with it; who forthwith went to the woman, and asked how her forehead became 
bloody ; and she answered, ' by a blow of the cow's horn ;' whereby he was satis- 
fied that it was a design of Satan to render an innocent person suspected." 



324 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

tliough lie now doth come, yet he shall not live long, but shall 
die as ill a death as they ; and that they would have made corn 
like pepper." These were the mere ravings of puritanical dis- 
content, repetitions probably of sentiments they had heard among 
their neighbors. The relater continues : " Many great charges 
against them, and little proved, they were put to the ducking in 
the river : they would not sink, but swam aloft. The man had 
five teats, the women three, and the eldest daughter one. When 
they went to search the women, none were visible ; one advised 
to lay them on their backs and keep open their mouths, and then 
they would appear ; and so they presently appeared in sight." 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

WITCHCRAFT IN GERMANY IN THE EARLIER PART OF 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

In Germany, since the fifteenth century, sorcery had been un- 
dergoing much the same fate as in France and Spain. In the 
writers of the sixteenth century we trace a system of demonol- 
ogy differing only in some of its details from that of the other 
countries which we have reviewed, and in some respects per- 
haps more complete. It has more bold and striking points, a 
circumstance arising no doubt from the fact that here the ancient 
Teutonic mythology retained a stronger hold upon the popular 
mind. The sites of primitive worship are more distinctly 
marked ; and such mountains as Blocksberg, Inselsberg, Wec- 
kingstein near Minden, StafFelstein near Bamberg, Kreidenberg 
near VVurzburg, . Bonigsberg near Loccum, Fellerberg near 
Treves, Kandel in Brisgau, and Heuberg in the Schwarz 
forest, which occur as the scenes of the great sabbaths of the 
witches of this period, were no doubt sacred places of the early 
Germans. 

The witchcraft trials in Germany during the sixteenth century 
were numerous and curious, and there as elsewhere we can trace 
their origin often in personal feuds, in political enmities, and 
more especially in religious differences.* It was, however, at 

* The best general treatise on witchcraft in the German language is, I believe, 
that by Dr. W. G. Soldan, " Gescliichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Cluellen dar- 
gestellt." (Stuttgart, 1843.) The great collections of materials are Horst's Zau- 



PERSECUTION OF WITCHES AT WURZBURG. 325 

the commencement of the seventeenth century, on the eve of 
those terrible religious wars which tore Germany to pieces, that 
the prosecutions against witchcraft took there their grand develop- 
ment. They were most remarkable at the cities of Bamberg and 
Wiirzburg, and other places where the Roman catholic religion 
was prevalent, and which were under the immediate influence of 
the Jesuits. Some of the earlier writers on sorcery had declared 
that the increasing number of witches in the sixteenth century 
was owing to the spread of protestantism, and the Jesuits now 
seized upon this doctrine as a means of influencing the minds of 
the vulgar against the heretic. It is probable, therefore, that of 
the multitudes of persons who perished at the stake in Germany 
during the first half of the seventeenth century for sorcery, the 
only crime of many was their attachment to the religion of 
Luther. 

The period of the great persecutions of witches in Wiirzburg 
and Bamberg was one of great suffering, when the country had 
been reduced to poverty by a merciless war, and when the petty 
princes of the empire Avere not unwilling to seize upon any pre- 
tence to fill their coffers ; and it has been remarked that in Bam- 
berg, at least, the persons prosecuted were in general those, the 
confiscation of whose property was a matter of consideration. 
At Bamberg, as Avell as at Wiirzburg, the bishop was a sovereign 
prince in his dominions. There had long been a silent war in 
this place between Catholicism and the reformation, for the latter 
had gained a footing in the preceding age from which its oppo- 
nents had not yet been able to drive it. The prince-bishop John 
George II., who ruled Bamberg from 1622 to 1633, after several 
unsuccessful attempts to root out Lutheranisra from his domin- 
ions, commenced his attacks upon it in 1625, mider another name, 
and the rest of his reign Avas distinguished by a series of sangui- 
nary witch-trials which disgrace the annals of that city. His 
grand agent in these proceedings was Frederic Forner, suffragan 
of Bamberg, a blind supporter of the Jesuits, and a great enemy 
of heretics and sorcerers, against whom he published a treatise 
under the formidable title of Panoplia armaturcB Dei. We may 
form some notion of the proceedings of this worthy from the 
statement of the most authentic historians of this city, that be- 
tween 1625 and 1639, not less than nine hundred trials took place 
in the two courts of Bamberg and Zeil ; and a pamphlet pub- 

ber-Bibliothek, and Hauber's Bibliotheca Magica. Tbe present chapter is taken 
cbiefly from Soldau's book, with which I was not acquainted when the earlier part 
of this book was written. 

28 



326 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

lished at Bambei'g by authority, in 1659, states the number of 
persons which Bishop John George had caused to be burnt for 
sorcery, to have been six hundred. 

Among the persons thus sacrificed were the chancellor, his son, 
Doctor Horn, with his wife and two daughters, and many of the 
lords and councillors of the bishop's court, and these are stated 
to have confessed that above twelve hundred of them had con- 
federated together, and that if their sorcery had not been brought 
to light, they would have brought it to pass within four years, that 
there would have been neither wine nor corn in the country, and 
thaf thereby man and beast would have perished with hunger, 
and men be driven to eat one another. There were even some 
catholic priests, we are told, among them, who had been led into 
practices too dreadful to be described, and they confessed, among 
other things, that they had baptized many children in the devil's 
name. It must be stated that these confessions vv'ere made un- 
der tortures of the most fearful kind, far more so than anything 
that ^vas practised in France or other countries. Two of the city 
magistrates (hurgurmeistersj, besides other extraordinary things 
they had done, said that they had often raised such terrible 
storms, that houses were thrown down and trees torn up by the 
roots, and that it had been their intention to raise such a wind as 
should overthrow the great tower of Bamberg. The wives of 
one of the burgomasters and of the town-butcher declared that it 
was their task to make the ointment for the sorcerers, from each 
of which they received two pennies a week, and that this 
amounted in a year to six hundred gulders or florins. The bur- 
gomaster Neidecker, acknowledged that he had assisted in poi- 
soning the wells by sorcery, so that whoever drank of them would 
immediately be struck with pestilence, and that thus great multi- 
tudes had perished. The history of Germany shows how easy 
it was at this time to point out the ravages of war, pestilence, and 
famine. It was also acknowledged that no less than three thou- 
sand sorcerers and witches assembled at the dance on the Kreid- 
enberg mountain near Wiirzburg, on the night of St. Walpurgis, 
and that each having given a kreuzer to the musician, he gained 
no less than forty gulders, and that at the same dance they drunk 
seven " fudder" of wine which they had stolen from the bishop 
of Wiirzburg's cellar. There were little girls of from seven to 
ten years of age among the witches, and seven-and-twenty of 
them were convicted and burnt. The numbers brought to trial 
in these terrible proceedings were so great, and they were 
treated with so little consideration, that it was usual not even to 



THE BURNINGS AT WURZBURG. 327 

take tlie trouble of setting down their names, but they were cited 
as the accused, Nos. 1,2, 3, and so on. The Jesuits took their 
confessions in private, and they made up the list of those who 
were understood to have been denounced by them. 

Lutheranism had been gaining ground in Wiirzburg more even 
than in Bamberg, and when Bishop Julius came to the see in 
1575, the majority of the population was protestant. The ener- 
gy with which he set about making converts alarmed many of 
those who had anything to lose in the world, and the number of 
" heretics" was thus soon diminished. Nevertheless, Bishop 
Philip Adolph, who came to the see in 1623, found a sufficient 
number of protestants to excite his alarm, and not daring, in the 
political position of Germany at that moment, to persecute them 
openly for their religion, he adopted the plan of his neighbor of 
Bamberg. A great confederacy of sorcerers was suddenly dis- 
covered, and during two or three years hundreds of people, of all 
ages and conditions, v/ere hurried to the stake. A catalogue of 
nine-and-twenty brdnde, or burnings, during a very short period 
of time previous to the February of 1629, will give the best no- 
tion of the horrible character of these proceedings ; it is printed 
from the original record in Hauber's Bibliotheca Magica. 

In the First Burning, Four Persons. 

The wife of Liebler. 
Old Ancker's v/idow. 
The wife of Gutbrodt. 
The wife of Hooker. 

In the Second Burning, Four Persons. 

The old wife of Beutler. 

Two strange women. 

The old woman who kept the pot-house. 

lu the Third Burning, Five Persons. 

Tungersleber, a minstrel. 
The wife of Kuler.- 
The wife of Stier, a proctor. 
The brushmaker's wife. 
The goldsmith's wife. 

In the Fourth Burning, Five Persons. 

The wife of Siegmund the glazier, a burgomaster. 
Brickmann's wife. 



323 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

The midwife. N.B. She was the origin of all the mischief. 
Old Rume's wife. 
A strange man. 

In the Fifth Burning, Eight Persons. 

Liitz, an eminent shopkeeper. 

Rutscher, a shopkeeper. 

The housekeeper of the dean of the cathedral. 

The old wife of the court ropemaker. 

Jo. Stembach's housekeeper. 

The wife of Baunach, a senator. 

A woman named Znickel Babel. 

An old woman. 

Li the Sixth Burning, Six Persons, 

The steward of the senate, named Gering. 

Old Mrs. Canzler. 

The fat tailor's wife. 

The woman cook of Mr. Mengerdorf. 

A strange man. 

A strange woman. 

In the Seventh Burning, Seven Persons. 

A strange girl of twelve years old. 

A strange man. 

A strange woman.* 

A strange bailiff (schultheiss). 

Three strange women. 

In the Eighth Burning, Seven Persons. 

Baunach, a senator, the fattest citizen in Wurzburg. 

The steward of the dean of the cathedral. 

A strange man. 

The knife-grinder. 

The ganger's wife. 

Two strange women. 

In the Ninth Burning, Five Persons. 

Wunth, the wheelwright. 
A strange man, 

* It must be understood that strange means, not a citizen of Wurzburg. Per- 
haps the numerous strange men and women were protestant refugees from other 
parts. 



THE BURNINGS AT WURZBURG. 329 



Bentze's daughter. 
Bentze's wife herself. 
The wife of Eyering. 



In the Tenth Burning, Three Persons. 

Steinacher, a very rich man. 
A strange woman. 
A strange man. 

In the Eleventh Burning, Four Persons. 

Schwerdt, a vicar- choral in the cathedral. 
Rensackei''s housekeeper. 
The wife of Stiecher. 
Silberhans, a minstrel. 

In the Twelfth Burning, Two Persons. 

Two strange women. 

In the Thirteenth Burning, Four Persons. 

The old smith of the court. 
An old woman, 

A little girl nine or ten years old. 
A younger girl, her little sister. 

In the Fourteenth Burning, Two Persons. 

The mother of the two little girls before mentioned. 
Liebler's daughter, aged twenty-four years. 

In the Fifteenth Burning, Tivo Persons. 

A boy of twelve years of age, in the first school. 
A butcher's wife. 

In the Sixteenth Burning, Six Persons. 

A noble page of Ratzenstein, was executed in the chancellor's 
yard at six o'clock in the morning, and left upon his bier all day, 
and then next day burnt with the following : — 

A boy of ten years of age. 

The two daughters of the steward of the senate, and his maid. 

The fat ropemaker's wife. 

In the Seventeenth Burning, Four Persons. 

The innkeeper of the Baumgarten. 
A boy eleven years old. 

28* 



330 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

The wife of the apothecary at the Hirsch [the Stag), and her 
daughter. 

N.B. — A woman Avho played the harp had hanged herself. 

In the Eighteenth Burning, Six Persons. 

Batsch, a tanner. 
Two boys of twelve years old. 
The daughter of Dr. Junge. 
A girl of fifteen years of age. 
A strange woman. 

In the Nineteenth Burning, Six Persons. 

A noble page of Rotenham was beheaded at six o'clock in the 
chancellor's yard, and burnt the following day 
The wife of the secretary Schellhar. 
A woman. 

A boy of ten years of age. 
Another boy twelve years old. 
Brugler's wife, a cymbal-player (heckin), was burnt alive. 

In the Twentieth Burning Six Persons. 

Gobel's child, the most beautiful girl in Wiirzburg. 
A student on the fifth form, who knew many languages, and 
was an excellent musician vocaliter et instrumentaliter . 
Two boys from the new minister, each twelve years old. 
Stepper's little daughter. 
The woman who kept the bridge-gate. 

In the Tioenty-jirst Burning, Six Persons. 

The master of the Dietricher hospital, a very learned man. 

Stoffel Holtzmann. 

A boy foHrteen years old. 

The little son of Senator Stolzenberger. 

Two alumni. 

In the Twenty- second Burning, Six Persons. 

Stiirman, a rich cooper. 

A strange boy. 

The grown-up daughter of Senator Stolzenberger. 

The wife of Stolzenberger herself. 

The washerwoman in the new building. 

A strange woman. 



THE BURNINGS AT WURZBURG. 331 

In the Twenty-third Burning, Nine Persons. 

David Crolen's boy, of nine years old, on the second form. 

The two sons of the prince's cook, one of fourteen years, the 
other often years, from the first school. 

Melchior Hammelraann, vicar at Hach. 

Nicodemns Hirsch, a canon in the new minster. 

Christopher Berger, vicar in the new minster. 

An alumnus. 

N.B. — The bailiff in the Brennerbach court and an alumnus 
were burnt alive. 

In the Twenty-fourth Burning, Seven Persons. 

Two boys in the hospital. 

A rich cooper. 

Lorenz Stiiber, vicar in the new minster. 

Batz, vicar in the new minster. 

Lorenz Roth, vicar in the new minster. 

A woman named Rossleins Martin. 

In the Twenty-fifth Burning, Six Persons. 

Frederick Basser, vicar in the cathedral. 

Stab, vicar at Hach. 

Lambrecht, canon in the new minster. 

The wife of Gallus Hansen. 

A strange boy. 

Schelmerei, the huckstress. 

I?i the Twenty-sixth Burning, Seven Persons. 

David Hans, a canon in the new minster. 
Weydenbusch, a senator. 
The innkeeper's wife of the Bamugarten. 
An old woman. 

The little daughter of Valkenberger was privately executed 
and burnt on her bier. 

The little son of the town council bailiff. 

Herr Wagner, vicar in the cathedral, was burnt alive. 

In the Twenty-seventh Burning, Seven Persons. 

A butcher, named Kilian Hans. 
The keeper of the bridge-gate. 
A strange boy. 
A strange woman. 



332 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

The son of the female minstrel, vicar at Hach. 
Michel Wagner, vicar at Hach. 
Knor, vicar at Hach. 

In the Twenty-eighth Burning, after Candlemas, 1629, 
Six Persons. 

The vi^ife of Knertz the butcher. 

The infant daughter of Dr. Schiiltz. 

A blind girl. 

Schwartz, canon at Hach. 

Ehling, a vicar. 

Bernhard Mark, vicar in the cathedral, was burnt alive. 

In the Twenty-ninth Burning, Seven Persons. 

Viertel Beck. , 

The innkeeper at Klingen. 

The bailifT of Mergelsheim. 

The w^ife of Beck at the Ox-tower. 

The fat noble lady [edelfrau). 

N.B. — A doctor of divinity at Hach and a canon were exe- 
cuted early at five o'clock in the morning, and burnt on their 
bier. 

A gentleman of Adel, called Junker Fleischbaum. 

We are assured at the end of this document that there were 
many other burnings beside those here enumerated. It appears 
that, except in particular cases, the judges showed so much 
mercy as to cause their victims to be put to death by beheading 
before they were burnt. 

One of the victims on this occasion excited especial commis- 
eration, because he was of high rank, a kinsman of the bishop 
himself, on whom he attended as a page of the court, and be- 
cause he was young, handsome, and interesting. The youthful 
Ernst von Ehrenberg, we are told, was remarkable chiefly for 
the attention he paid to his studies in the university of Wiirz- 
burg, and for the progress which he made in them, until he was 
seduced by his aunt, a lady of rank in that city, who received 
him as a kinsman into her family. This lady, the Jesuits tell 
us, was an abandoned witch — perhaps she was a protestant — 
and she soon taught her nephew to pursue evil courses, until 
from an undue familiarity with herself he proceeded to become 
a familiar of the devil. For a while he had sufficient dissimu- 
lation to conceal his wickedness, until the change became evi- 
dent from his increasing neglect of his studies and his religious 



ERNST VON EHRENBERG. 333 

duties, and instead of being as before, remarkable for his atten- 
tion to his books he now spent his time at play and amoncr the 
ladies. The Jesuit inquisitors were alarmed at his conduct, and 
undertook to discover the cause. They found, or pretended to 
find, by the confessions of some of the sorcerers brought to the 
stake, that, through the seductions of his aunt, he had sold him- 
self to the devil, aad that he had attended the sabbaths of the 
Avitches. The bishop determined to convert his kinsman, if pos- 
sible, to a different life. On his profession of repentance and 
promise of amendment, he was delivered to the care of the 
Jesuits, that he might profit by their teaching, and they took Him 
to their house, where they loaded him with holy amulets, agnus- 
deis, relics and holy water, and appointed one of their order to 
attend upon him both day and night, to protect him against the 
attempts of the fiend. The Jesuits, however, soon found, as 
they declared, that no distemper was so incurable as sorcery. 
Whenever he had the opportunity, he laid aside the holy articles 
with which he was encumbered at night, and then the devil 
came to him and carried him away to the witches' meetings, 
whence he contrived to return before four o'clock in the 
morning, the hour when his spiritual instructors rose. Once or 
twice, however, perhaps rising earlier than usual, they found his 
bed empty, and they discovered from this and some other cir- 
cumstances how he spent his nights. They now declared that 
all his promises of amendment were only intended to deceive, 
and that they entertained no further hopes of him. He was ac- 
cordingly condemned to death, and the judgment was held over 
him in terrorem with the hope that he might still be induced to 
repent. The conclusion of his story is dramatically told by the 
Jesuit who has left us a relation of it. The Jesuits were to pre- 
pare him for death. Early on the morning of the day appointed 
for his execution — it appears that he had not been made acquaint- 
ed with his sentence — they went to him and told him, in ambig- 
uous language, that he was to prepare for a better life than that 
he had hitherto led, and then took him into the castle. Here he 
recognised with an innocent joy the scenes of his childish gam- 
bols ; " there," said he, " I played, there I drank, there I 
danced," and went on making remarks of this kind, until he 
was conducted into a room hung with black, where a scaffold 
was erected. Then he turned pale, and for a few minutes stood 
trembling and speechless ; but when the executioners attempted 
to lay their hands upon him, he raised such a cry of distress 
that the judges themselves were moved by it, and they went to 



334 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

intercede with the bishop in his favor. The prince made a last 
attempt, and sent a messenger to offer him forgiveness if he 
would promise a thorough reformation. But the messenger re- 
turned with an answer that all was in vain, for the devil had so 
hardened the youth, that he boldly declared he would remain as 
he was, that he had no need of repentance or change, and that 
if he were not so already, he would wish to become so. Then 
the prince sternly signified his will that justice should take its 
course. They dragged the youth again into the dark chamber, 
supported on each side by a Jesuit, who urged him to repentance ; 
buf he persisted in saying that he needed no repentance, begged 
for his life, tried to wrest himself from the grasp of the officers, 
and gave no attention to the exhortations of the priests. At last 
the executioner seized a favorable moment, and in the midst of 
his struggles to escape struck the head from his body at a blow. 
We will not multiply our list of executions of witches in Ger- 
many. The persecution raised by the Jesuits against the sor- 
cerers seemed increasing rather than otherwise, when one of 
their order, a pious and learned man, named Frederick Spee, a 
native of Cologne, raised his voice against this cruelty, by pub- 
lishing, in the year 1631, a treatise on the subject, under the title 
of Cautio Criminalis, in which he pointed out the necessity of 
taking Avith more caution the sort of evidence which it was usual 
to adduce against offenders of this class. It was, as its author 
states in the title, " A book very necessary at that time for the 
magistracy throughout Germany" (liber ad magistratus Germanm 
hoc tem-pore necessarius), and it no doubt had a great influence in 
putting a stop to the wholesale prosecutions which had become 
so prevalent. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

THE WITCHES OF SCOTLAND UNDER KING JAMES AFTER HIS 
ACCESSION TO THE ENGLISH THRONE. 

In the earlier ages of society, the practice of medicine, which 
consisted in a curing of wounds, was usually intrusted to the 
women. It was their business to gather the best herbs^ and to 
know their several virtues. The remedies were often very sim- 
ple, and required no great knowledge to prepare and apply them, 



THE WITCHES OP SCOTLAND. 335 

and the professed healers, who themselves believed in the effi- 
cacy of charms and " characters," and imagined that the proper- 
ties of different herbs were given to them by the spirits who pre- 
sided over woods and fields, found an advantage at the same time 
in clothing their remedies in adventitious mystery. To what an ex- 
tent this was practised will be fully understood by any one who is 
conversant with the collections of medicinal receipts in mediaeval 
manuscripts. After the Roman civilization had introduced itself 
among the various branches of the Teutonic race, and schools 
of medicine were established, a new race of practitioners sprang 
up, superior to the others, by their learning and theoretic knowl- 
edge, but still judging it convenient to create a popular reverence 
for their art by clothing it in a similar garb of mystery. Thus, 
medicine, in whatever circumstances it was found, was deeply 
intermixed with superstition. 

In process of time these two classes of medical practitioners 
became more widely separated from each other, the scholastic 
physicians rising in professional character, while the others went 
on degenerating until they became literally " old women doctors." 
This vulgar medicinal knowledge became at last united with 
sorcery in the person of the witch, as it had formerly been uni- 
ted with the religious worship of the people in the functions of 
the priestess. The latter received her knowledge by the inspi- 
ration of the gods ; the former derived her knowledge of the vir- 
tues of herbs by the gift of the fairies or of the devil. Many of 
them added to these a profession of a far more horrible charac- 
ter. They were acquainted with herbs of which the properties 
were noxious, as well as with those which vv^ere beneficial, and 
they acquired at times an extraordinary skill in concocting poi- 
sons of different degrees of force, and which acted in different 
manners. The witches were the great poisoners of the middle 
ages, arid their practice was no doubt far more extensive than, 
even with what we have recently witnessed among our peasantry, 
we can easily imagine. 

Nearly all the Scottish watches of the first half of the seven- 
teenth century were such vulgar practitioners in the healing art, 
and some of them at least were poisoners. Our materials are 
again furnished almost entirely by Robert Pitcairn, whose collec- 
tion of early Scottish criminal trials is one of the most curious 
works of the kind that has ever been published. 

The first instance of an offender of this class in the seventeenth 
century that occurs in these registers is that of James Reid, of 
Musselburgh, who was brought to trial as a " common sorcerer. 



336 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

charmer, and abuser," on the 21st of July, 1602. James Reid 
professed to heal all kinds of diseases, •' quhilk cral't he lernit 
fra the devill, his maister, in Bynnie craigis and Corstorphia 
craigis, quhair he met with him and consultit with him to lerne 
the said craft ; quha (that is, James Reid) gaif him thrie pennies 
at ane tyme, and a peice creische (grease) out of his bag at ane 
uther tyme." The devil's terms, on this occasion, were not very 
exorbitant. This first interview took place some thirteen years 
before the time of his trial, and he had since that had frequent 
meetings with the evil one, who appeared sometimes in the form 
of a man, and sometimes in that of a horse. His grand specific 
in effecting his cures was water from a south-running stream. 
Among the crimes enumerated in his indictment were several 
" cures" performed, to use the words of the record, " in his dev- 
ilish manner ;" but the most serious charge against him was a 
conspiracy against the life of one David Libbertoun, a baker of 
Edinburgh. There was a feud between this man and the family 
of John Crystie, of Crystiesoun's mylne, or mill, arising perhaps 
from some dishonest transactions between them, for in former 
days the roguery of bakers and millers was proverbial. Crys- 
tie's daughter, Jonet, and some other women of the family ap- 
plied to James Reid for revenge, and he held a consultation with 
the fiend for the purpose of bringing destruction on Libbertoun, 
his family, goods, and corn. James's instructor made him take 
a piece of raw flesh, on which he made nine nicks or notches, 
and " enchanted the same." The flesh was given to Jonet Crys- 
tie, one half to be laid under the door of Libbertoun's mill, and 
the other under the door of his stable ; the object of the latter 
being to bewitch his horses and cattle. Satan also enchanted 
nine stones, which were to be thrown on David Libbertoun's 
lands, to destroy his corn. They next made a " picture" of wax, 
which the fiend also " enchanted ;" and this the women roasted 
at a fire in Crystie's house, to effect the destruction of Libber- 
toun himself. The latter in due course died. 

In England they were contented with the cheaper and easier 
process of hanging the witches, but in Scotland, as in Germany, 
the good old system of burning was still persevered in, although 
they now generally put the victims to death by strangling, or 
some other means, before they were committed to the flames. 
This act of mercy was probably occasioned by the horrible scenes 
that burning alive continually gave rise to. We learn from the 
minutes of the Scotch privy council, that, on the 1st of Decem- 
ber, 1608, " The earl of Mar declared to the council that some 



PATRICK LOWRIE. 337 

women were taken in Broughton (the suburb of Edinburgh) as 
witches, and being put to an assize, and convicted, albeit they 
persevered constant in their denial to the end, yet they were 
burnt quick, after such a cruel manner, that some of them died in 
despair, renouncing and blaspheming ; and others, half burnt, 
broke out of the fire, and were cast quick in it again, till they 
were burnt to death." 

James Reid was wirreit, or strangled, and then burnt. 

We learn from these same registers, that a man named Pat- 
rick Lowrie, of Halie in Ayrshire, commonly known by the 
name of Pat the witch, suffered the same fate in the July of the 
year 1605. This man had been in confederacy with several 
women witches, and on the Whitsunday of 1604 they had held 
a meeting with the evil one on the Sandhills in Kyle, near the 
burgh of Irvine. On Hallow-Eve, the same year, they assem- 
bled again on Lov/don-hill, where a spirit, in the likeness of a 
woman, who called herself Helen M'Brune, appeared to them, 
and after a long consultation, gave Patrick a hair-belt, " in one 
of the ends of which belt appeared the similitude of four fingers 
and a thumb, not far different from the clav\^s of the devil."' They 
afterward visited the neighboring churches and churchyards, to 
dig up the dead from their graves, and dismember them, " for 
the practising of their witchcraft and sorcery." This man, like 
the former, injured some people, and performed cures for others ; 
he was charged especially with curing a child of " ane strange 
incureabill disease." 

The practices of Isobel Griersoune, the wife of a laborer at 
Prestonpans named John Bull, were still more extraordinary. 
She was tried on the 10th of March, 1607, and it appeared that, 
having conceived a " cruel hatred and malice" against one Adam 
Clark, of the same place, she used during a year and a half " all 
devilish and ungodly means" to be avenged upon him. One 
night, in the November of 1606, between eleven o'clock and 
midnight, when the whole family, consisting of Adam, his wife, 
and a woman-servant, were asleep in their beds, she entered 
their house in the likeness of her ov/n cat, accompanied with a 
great number of other cats, and made such an uproar that the 
inmates went nearly mad. Then, to increase the tumult, the 
devil, in the shape of a black man, made his appearance, and, 
in a fearful manner, seizing the servant as she stood in the mid- 
dle of the floor, tore her cap from her head and threw it in the 
fire, and dragged her up and down the house with so much vio- 
lence that she was obliged to keep her bed for six weeks after. 

29 



333 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

Such scenes as this seldom occur in the stories of English 
"witchery. Previous to this occurrence, at the beginning of the 
year 1600, the same Isobel had taken offence against a man of 
the same town, named William Burnet. She threw a piece of 
raw " enchanted" flesh at his door, and he was immediately 
struck with a dreadful malady, and for the space of a year the 
demon haunted the house nightly, in the shape of a " naked in- 
fant bairn." In consequence of these and other similar persecu- 
tions, William Burnet languished three years and died. An- 
other man refused to pay her the sum of nine shillings and four- 
pence, which he owed her, and he was seized with a grievous 
sickness, which never left him till the debt was discharged. An 
alehouse-keeper affronted her, and all his ale became " thick 
like gutter dirt," and smelled so bad that nobody would touch it. 
An innkeeper's wife gave her some cause of offence, and she 
went " under silence and cloud of night," and, entering the house 
" after a devilish and unknown way," dragged her by the hair 
out of bed from the side of her husband, and threw her on the 
floor, " whereby her spirit failed her," and she continued in a 
helpless state during five or six days. On this occasion, Isobel 
Griersoune was publicly accused of being the cause of the wo- 
man's sickness, and she therefore employed her neighbors to 
bring her and the innkeeper's wife to drink together, after which 
the latter recovered ; but she again called her a witch, where- 
upon Isobel, who appears to have possessed anything but a gen- 
tle temper, flew into a rage, and said to her, " the fagot of hell 
light on thee, and hell's caldron may thou seethe in !" Her 
weakness returned, and remained with her till the time of Iso- 
bel's trial. Isobel Griersoune was burnt on the Castle-hill at 
Edinburgh. In the December of the same year a man was 
burnt there for the same crime ; he was accused of poisoning 
people, as well as curing. Other similar cases occur in the fol- 
lowing years, and no doubt many might be instanced from other 
parts of Scotland. 

On the 27th of May, 1605, a woman named Beigis Tod, of 
" Lang Nydrie," was tried for sorcery, and condemned to the 
stake. It was stated that in the August of 1594, she, with her 
sister and some others, met another party of witches at " Deane- 
fute of Lang Nydrie," where the devil appeared to them, and 
reproved Beigis Tod " very sharply" for her long tarrying. She 
said, " Sir, I could win na sooner." They all passed together 
to Beigis's house in Lang Nydrie, where, after they had drunk 
together " a certain space," they took a cat and drew it nine 



THE TRAGEDY OF THE ERSKINES. 339 

times through the " cruik," or iron on which the pot was hung 
over the fire ; and then they went with all speed to Seatoim 
thorn, to the north of the gate. Thorns were always favorite 
meeting-places of witches and spirits. When they came to the 
thorn, the devil left them to fetch Cristiane Tod, a sister of 
Beigis, " and passed to Robert Smart's house, and brought her 
out ; and as she was coming with him, she took a great fright, 
and said to the devil, ' Sir, what will you do with me ?' who an- 
swered her, ' tak na feir, for ye sail gang to your sister Beigis, 
and to the rest of hir cumpanie quha ar stayand upon your cum- 
ing at the thorn.' " Then they all went with Satan to the iron 
gate of Seatoun, where they again took a cat, and drew it nine 
times through the iron gate. Immediately afterward they went 
to a barn, where they christened the cat, and called her Mar- 
garet. Tiiey then returned to Deanefate, where they first met, 
and cast the cat to the evil one. We are not told the object of 
these strange proceedings. 

The year 1613 was rendered remarkable in the annals of 
Scottish sorcery by two very extraordinary cases, one of which 
belonged to high life. John Erskine, laird of Dun in the coun- 
ty of Angus, and grandson of the celebrated John Erskine who 
held the office of superintendent of Angus and Mearnes, and dis- 
tinguished himself by his exertions in support of the Reforma- 
tion, had two sons, David, who inherited the lordship, and Rob- 
ert, and three daughters, Helen, Isobel, and Anne. David 
Erskine, the elder brother, died young, leaving two boys, John 
and Alexander, the former of whom was acknowledged as the 
young laird. Robert Erskine and his three sisters seem to have 
been more attached to one another than to their late brother ; the 
sisters especially seem to have been wicked women, and, now 
that only two children stood between him and the hereditary 
estates of the family, they urged their surviving brother to secure 
the lairdship and propei'ty by one of those bold bad actions which 
were so common in feudal times. It appears that a dispute had 
arisen relating to the wardship of the children, and that Robert 
Erskine was disappointed at not getting his nephews into his 
own ward. About the midsummer of 1610, a meeting between 
Robert and his three sisters took place in his mansion of Logy, 
and it was resolved that the children, of whom one seems to 
have been on a visit to Logy and the other was residing with 
his mother in Montrose, should be carried off by poison, which 
must be prepared and rendered effectual by witchcraft. Two 
of the sisters, who appear to have been the most active in this 



340 SORCERY AND MAGIC, 

affair, proposed to one David Blewhouse that he should find a 
witch and see the work done without their direct interference, 
and in return for this service he was to receive five hundred 
marks of silver and a piece of land. x\n agreement to this effect 
was drawn up, but for some reason or other it was subsequently 
broken off, and the two sisters, Anne and Helen, determined to 
take the matter in hand themselves. They accordingly set off 
together, and went over the Cairne-mouth towai'd " Mure-ail- 
house," to a notorious witch named Janet Irwing, from whom 
they received a '• great quantity" of herbs, with particular direc- 
tions how to use them. These they carried home to Logy, but 
Robert Erskine was not satisfied that they were sufficiently pow- 
erful for his purpose, and paid a visit in person to the witch, 
who took away all his scruples on this head. They now pro- 
ceeded to make this poisonous drink, according to the witch's 
directions, and everything being ready, Robert Erskine rode 
over to Montrose, taking the boy who was with him home to his 
brother and mother. There the drink was secretly adminis- 
tered, and the victims were suddeidy plunged into dreadful suf- 
ferings, and exhibited every s3anptom of being poisoned, till 
they both died, " and sa was crewallie and tresonabilie mur- 
thoret," to use the expressive words of the record. The mur- 
derers did not long enjoy the result of their crime ; how the 
discovery was made is not told, but it seems probable that 
David Blewhouse turned traitor. On the 30th of November, 
1613, Robert Erskine was brought for examination before the 
Scottish privy council, and though he denied all knowledge of 
the murder at first, he ended by making a full confession. The 
course of justice was quick at this time, and he was beheaded 
on the 1st of December at the " Mercat" cross in Edinburgh. 
His sisters seem to have possessed stronger nerves, for in face 
of his confession, and the evidence of Blewhouse and other wit- 
nesses, they continued " obdurate in a constant denial." They 
were not brought to a trial till the 22d of June, 1614, but the evi- 
dence against them was so conclusive, that they were at once 
found guilty, and two of them were like their brother beheaded 
at the Mercat-cross. The third obtained a respite from the king, 
who subsequently changed her punishment from death to per- 
petual banishment. 

The other Scottish tragedy of the year 1613 was, in some re- 
spects, of a more romantic character, and we only know it from 
a copy of the record of the trial sent to Sir Walter Scott. Two 
brothers, Archibald and John Dein, lived in the town of Irvine, 



MARGAEET BARCLAY. 341 

of which they were burgesses ; the first had married a woman 
named Janet Lyal, while the wife of x\lexander, was Margaret Bar- 
clay. It appears that there was a quarrel between the two fam- 
ilies, and John Dein and his wife publicly accused Margaret Bar- 
clay of theft. Margaret Barclay raised an action of slander be- 
fore the church court, which was discharged, and the opponents 
directed to be reconciled. But Margaret did not possess a con- 
ciliating temper, and she declared that she only gave her hand 
in obedience to the kirk-session, but that her animosity against 
John Dein and his spouse was unabated. Soon after this occur- 
rence, John Dein's ship prepared to sail for France, and he took 
with him the provost of the burgh of Irvine, Andrew Tran, who 
was one of the owners of the vessel. As they were starting, 
Margaret Barclay was heard to pray that sea nor salt water might 
never bear the ship, and that partans, or crabs, might eat the 
crew at the bottom of the sea. The first news of the ship which 
reached Irvine, came by a wandering juggler named John Stew- 
art, who called at the house of the provost, and dropped broad 
hints that he knew by some mysterious means that the vessel 
was lost, and that the provost himself had perished. Aiter a 
short period of anxiety in the provost's family, all doubt was re- 
moved by the ai-rival of two of the crew, who stated that their 
ship had been wrecked on the coast of England near Padstow, 
and that they were the sole survivors of all who were on board. 
People remembered Margaret Barclay's imprecations, and suspi- 
cions of sorcery were immediately excited against her and John 
Stewart, whose knowledge of the state of the ship seemed so 
extraordinary. 

Margaret Barclay appears to have been no favorite in the town 
of Irvine, and proceedings were commenced in a way most like- 
ly to turn to her confusion. The wandering juggler was first 
arrested, and fear or torture wrung from him a confession, in 
which he cleared himself by seriously compromising the other 
•person suspected. He said that Margaret Barclay, presuming 
perhaps on his character of a juggler, had applied to him to teach 
her some magic arts, " in order that she might get gear, kyes 
milk, love of man, her heart's desire on such persons a,s had done 
her wrong, and finally that she might obtain the fruit of sea and 
land." He replied that he neither possessed such arts, nor was 
able to communicate them to others, and thus the matter ended. 
But he said that subsequent to this, and shortly after. the ship set 
sail, he came accidentally one night to Margaret's house, and 
there he found her with two other women making clay figures, 

29* 



342 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

one of which was made handsome and with fair hair, he supposed 
to represent Provost Tran. They proceeded to make a figure 
of a ship in clay, and while they were thus occupied, the devil 
appeared in the shape of a handsome black lap-dog. When the 
ship was made, the whole party, Satan and all, left the house to- 
gether, and went into an empty waste house near the seaport. 
They afterward proceeded to the seaside, and cast in the figures 
of clay representing the ship and the men, and immediately the 
sea raged, roared, and became red like the juice of madder in a 
dyer's caldron. Margaret Barclay's female acquaintances were 
next convened, and when John Stewart was introduced to them, 
he at once fixed upon an old woman named Insh, as one of the 
persons engaged in making the figures. This woman stoutly 
denied all knowledge of the matter, and said she never saw her 
accuser before ; but the magistrates now brought forward her 
own daughter, a girl only eight years old, who lived in Margaret 
Barclay's house as a servant, and who had been made by some 
means or other to declare that she had been a witness to the 
scene described by the juggler, and that her mother was one of 
the persons engaged in it. This little girl improved upon the 
details given by Stewart ; she described other persons as being 
present, added a black man to the black dog, and said that the 
latter breathed flames from its jaws and nostrils, which illumina- 
ted the witches during the performance of the spell. She said 
that they had promised her a pair of new shoes to keep the se- 
cret, and that her mother, Isobel Insh, remained in the waste- 
house, and was not present when the images were thrown into 
the sea. 

John Stewart now underwent a new examination, and added 
to his own story so as to make it agree with that of the child. 
When asked how he gained the knowledge of things to come, 
he told a strange story of his adventures with the fairies ; it was 
probably a tale he had been accustomed to recount among the 
people where he visited in the exercise of his craft to give him- 
self importance in their eyes, and which he now half-uncon- 
sciously repeated before his judges. He stated that about twen- 
ty-six years before, as he was travelling on the night of All-hal- 
low's eve, between the towns of " Monygoif " and " Clary," in 
the county of Galway (in Ireland), he met with the king of the 
fairies and his company, and the king struck him over the forehead 
with a white rod, which deprived him of the power of speech and 
the use of one eye. After remaining in this condition during 
three years, his speech and eyesight were restored to him by 



MARGARET BARCLAY. 343 

the king of the fairies and his company, whom he again met on 
a Hallowe'en night near Dublin, since which time he had been 
in the habit of joining these people every Saturday at seven 
o'clock in the evening, and remaining with them all that night. 
They likewise met every Hallowtide, sometimes on Lanark 
hill, er, as Scott supposes, Tintock, and sometimes on Kilmaurs 
hill, when he w^as taught by them. Stewart pointed out the spot 
on his forehead Avhere the king of the fairies struck him with a 
white rod, whereupon, after he had been blindfolded by order of 
the magistrates and ministers who w'ere directing the examina- 
tion, they pricked the spot with a large pin, of which he appeared 
to be quite insensible. He repeated the names of many persons 
whom he had seen at the court of faerie, and declared that all 
persons who were taken away by sudden death w^ent thither. 

After these confessions, Isobel Insh was more hardly pressed 
to " tell the truth," and at length she confessed that she was pres- 
ent at the making and drowning of the clay images, but declared 
that she took no part in the proceedings. She was at this mo- 
ment in such a state of mind, that she evidently knew not what 
she was doing, and she supplicated her jailer. Bailie Dunlop, to 
let her go, promising him, for he also was a mariner, that if he 
did so, he should never make a bad voyage, but have success in 
all his dealings by sea and land, a promise tha't was easily con- 
strued into an acknowledgment that she possessed the powers 
attributed to her. Before she Avas conducted back to her prison 
in the belfry, she was made to promise that she would fully con- 
fess next day, but in the night she made a desperate attempt at 
escape. Althouoh secured with iron bolts, locks, and fetters, she 
succeeded in getting out at a back window, and reached the roof 
of the church, for here she lost her footing and fell to the ground. 
She was so much hurt and bruised, that she survived but five 
days, during which time she resolutely persisted in asserting her 
innocence, and denied all that she had before admitted. In spite 
of the evident causes of her death, the inhabitants of Irvine at- 
tributed it to poison. 

A commission was now granted for the trial of John Stewart 
and Margaret Barclay, and when the appointed day arrived, 
"My lord and earl of Eglintoune (who dwells within the space 
of one mile to the said burgh) having come to the. said burgh at 
the earnest request of the said justices, for giving to them of his 
lordship's countenance, concm-rence, and assistance, in trying 
of the foresaid devilish practices, conformable to the tenor of the 
foresaid commission, the said John Stewart, for his better pre- 



344 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

serving to the day of assize, Avas put in a sure lock-fast booth, 
"where no manner of person might have access to him till the 
down-sitting of the justice-court; and for avoiding of putting 
hands on himself, he was very strictly guarded, and fettered by 
the arms, as use is. And upon that same day of the assize, about 
half an hour before the dovv^n-sitting of the justice-court, Mr. 
David Dickson, minister at Irvine, and Mr. George Dunbar, min- 
ister of Ayr, having gone to him to exhort him to call on his 
God for mercy for his bygone wicked and evil life, and that God 
Avould of his infinite mercy loose him out of the bonds of the 
devil, whom he had served these many years bygone, he acqui- 
esced in their prayer and godly exhortation, and uttered these 
words, ' I am so straitly guarded, that it lies not in my power to 
get my hand to take ofi" my bonnet, nor to get bread to my mouth.' 
And immediately after the departure of the two ministers from 
him, the juggler being sent for, at the desire of my lord of Eg- 
lintoune, to be confronted with a woman of the burgh of Ayr, 
called Janet Bous, who was apprehended by the magistrates of 
the burgh of Ayr for witchcraft, and sent to the burgh of Irvine 
purposely for that affair, he was found, by the burgh officers who 
went about him, strangled and hanged by the cruik of the door, 
with a tait, or string, of hemp, supposed to have been his garter 
or string of his bonnet, not above the length of two span' long, 
his knees not being from the ground half a span, and was brought 
out of the house, his life not being totally expelled. But not- 
withstanding of whatsoever means used in the contrary for rem- 
eid of his life, he revived not, but so ended his life miserably, by 
the help of the devil his master." 

Margaret Barclay was the only one who now remained for 
trial, and it was determined to proceed with her at once, lest she 
should follow the example of the others. " Therefore, and for 
eschewing of the like in the person of the said Margaret, our 
sovereign lord's justice in that part, constituted by commission, 
after solemn deliberation and advice of the said noble lord, whose 
concurrence and advice was chiefly required and taken in this 
matter, concluded with all possible diligence, before the down- 
sitting of the justice court, to put the said Margaret to torture ; 
in respect the devil, by God's permission, had made her asso- 
ciates, who were the lights of the cause, to be their own ' bur- 
rioes' [executioners]. They used the torture underwritten as 
being most safe and gentle (as the said noble lord assured the 
said justices), by putting of her tw^o bare legs in a pair of stocks, 
and thereafter by on-laying of certain iron gauds [bars] severally 



THE STORY OF MARGARET BARCLAY. 345 

one by one, and then eking and augmenting the weight by laying 
on more gauds, and in easing of her by off-taking of the iron 
gauds one or more as occasion offered, which iron gauds were 
but httle short gauds, and broke not the skin of her legs. After 
vising of the which kind of gentle torture, the said Margaret be- 
gan, according to the increase of the pain, to cry and crave for 
God's cause to take off her shins the foresaid irons, and she 
would declare truly ihe whole matter. Which being removed, 
she began at her former denial ; and being of new arrayed in tor- 
ture as of before, she then uttered these words : ' Take off ! take 
off! and before God I shall show you the whole form !' And the 
said irons being of new, upon her faithful promise, removed, she 
then desired my lord of Eglintoune, the said four justices, and 
the said jMr. David Dickson, minister at the burgh, Mr. George 
Dunbar, minister of Ayr, and Mr. Mitchell Wallace, minister of 
Kilmarnock, Mr. John Cunninghame, minister of Dairy, and 
Hugh Keimedy, provost of Ayr, to come by themselves, and to 
remove all others, and she should declare truly as she should 
answer to God the whole matter. Whose desire in that being 
fulfilled, without any kind of demand, freely, without interroga- 
tion, God's name by earnest prayer being called upon for open- 
ing of her lips, and easing of her heart, that she, by rendering of 
the truth, might glorify and magnify his holy name, and disappoint 
the enemy of her salvation." 

Margaret Barclay's confession was a mere acknowledgment 
of the truth of what had been said by the others, but she declared 
that her purpose was to kill none but her brother-in-law and Pro- 
vost Tran. To make, up the number of persons pretended to 
have been present at the making of the images, she introduced 
the name of another woman of Irvine, Isobel Crawford ; wbo 
was thereupon arrested, and in great terror con.fessed it all. But 
when they proceeded with the trial, Alexander Dein, the husband 
of Margaret Barclay, appeared in court with a lawyer to act in 
her defence, and.she was asked by the lawyer if she wished to 
be defended, to which she made answer : " As you please ; but 
all I have confessed was in agony of torture, and,~before God, all 
I have spoken is false and untrue ;" adding pathetically, " Ye 
h ive been too long in coming." The jury were unmoved by this 
appeal ; it was considered that, as the iron bars were off her legs 
at the moment of her making the confession, it could not be said 
to be made under compulsion, and she was imanimously found 
guilty. After her sentence was passed, she returned to her con- 
fession, influenced perhaps by the hope in some way or other of 



346 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

better treatment. She was strangled at the stake, and then burnt 
to ashes. 

Before her death, Margaret Barclay. had entreated earnestly 
for Isobel Crawford, the' woman implicated in her confessionj 
that no injury should be done to her, but in vain. A new com- 
mission was obtained for her trial, and, as she was now obstinate 
in her denial, the same torture was applied to her, and with the 
same effect. She made a new confession, acknowledged eA'ery- 
thing that was imputed to her, and avowed that she had lived in 
intercourse with the evil one for several years. But when her 
sentence was passed, she again denied all that she had confessed, 
and persisted in her denial to the last. 

It appears to have been a mere quarrel among the wives of 
the burghers of Irvine which led to this tragical conclusion. The 
singularly detailed report of the proceedings of the trial, which 
was published by Sir Walter Scott, furnishes a most remarkable 
illustration of the manner in which they were conducted. We 
now return to the registers published by Mr. Pitcairn for a few 
examples illustrative of the character of the Scottish witches of 
this period. They show us not onlj^ how generally these " weird" 
women were employed^to cure diseases, but the particular char- 
acter of their remedies. 

Margaret Wallace, the wife of a burgess of Glasgow, was tried 
for sorcery on the 20th of March, 1622. The parti-cular crime 
for which she was brought into court was the bewitching of a 
burgess of the same town named Cuthbert Greg, a cooper, who 
had excited her " deadly hatred" by publicly calling her a witch. 
It was deposed that she had been heard to threaten that she 
would make him Avithin a few days unable to earn a cake of 
bread by his work. Shortly after this, he fell into sickness and 
extreme debility. His friends were convinced that Margaret 
Wallace was the cause of this visitation, and they went to her to 
beg her to restore him to his health. After many " malicious re- 
fusals," she yielded to their request, and went with them to his 
house, where she "took him by the shakel [wrist-bone] with 
one hand, and laid the other hand upon his breast, and without 
one word speaking, save only by moving of her lips, passed from 
him at that instant ; and upon the morn thereafter, returning back 
again to the said Cuthbert, she took him by the arm and bade 
him arise, who at that time and fifteen days before was not able 
to lift his legs without help ; yet she, having urged him to rise, 
and taking him by the hand, as said is, brought him out of his 
bed, and thereafter led him about the house ; who immediately 



MARGARET WALLACE. 347 

thereafter, by hei* sorcery and charming practised upon him, 
walked up and down the floor, without help or support of any; 
and front that time quickly recovered and convalesced of the for- 
mer grievous disease." 

Margaret Wallace had formerly been intimate with a woman 
of Glasgow named Cristiane Grahame, who was burnt three 
years before as a notorious witch, and they seem to have been 
in the habit of assisting one another. On one occasion, vt^hen 
the child of one of her neighbors was taken ill, she recommended 
Grahame to be sent for, and, on an objection being made, she 
protested " Cristiane Grahame could do as mickle in that errand 
in curing of that disease, as if God himself would come out of 
heaven and cure her ; and albeit the death-stroke were laid on, 
she could take it oft" again ; and without her help there could.be 
no remedy to the bairn." She further showed her confidence in 
the healing powers of this woman by sending for her when she 
was in want herself. A woman made the following deposition : 
It appeared that a ntian named Robert Stewart went with Marga- 
ret Wallace to an inn in Glasgow kept by one Alexander Val- 
lange, where this deponent was servant, and, as she said, they 
there " called for a choppine of ale, which was brought by a boy 
to them, named James Symsone ; and in drinking thereof, be- 
twixt Robert Stewart his taking the cup and ofl'ering it to Mar- 
garet Wallace, the said Margaret took a sudden ' brasche'of sick- 
ness, unknown to the deponent what sickness it was, wherein 
the said Margaret was so extremely handled that she was likely 
to rive herself." In her convulsions she cried, " Bring me hither 
my dear bird !" Margaret Montgomerie, the " good-wife" of the 
house, who was present, and who imagined that she was calling 
for her husband, said, " What dear bird would you have ? I be- 
lieve he is not at home." — " Na," answered Margaret Wallace, 
" bring me Cristiane Grahame, my dear bird !"— " All this while 
Margaret Montgomerie was holding her by the one hand, and 
Cristiane M'Clauchlane by the other. Thereafter, at her desire, 
Robert Stewart past, and with great diligence brought Cristiane 
Grahame to her, at whose sudden coming Margaret Montgom- 
erie said to Robert Stewart : ' Jesus save us ! I believe thou hast 
met her by- the way !' And Cristiane Grahame answered : ' Faith, 
he met me not, but came and brought me out of ray own cham- 
ber ; and fra I heard that my bird was sa diseased, I sped me 
hither.' Says, thereafter, that Cristiane Grahame took Margaret 
Wallace by the shakel-bone, and kist her ; and in her arms 
carried her down the stairs, saying to her, nothing should ail 



343 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

her." Another witness, a " chirurgeon," named Andro Mure, who 
deposed relating to the cure of one Margaret Mure, reveals a little 
glimpse of Scottish character. This man said : " He knows 
nothing of Margaret Mure's sickness, except that he himself 
■coming down the bridge-gate, he saw Cristiane Grahame come 
forth of Marioun Mure's house ; who thereafter came to the de- 
ponent, and desired him to gang in to the said Marioun ; and 
the deponent, at her desire, having passed into the house, at his 
incoming a roasted hen was set down on the board ; and the de- 
ponent, with David Scheirar and the said Marioun Mure, sat 
down at the board together ; and within a short space thereafter, 
Margaret Wallace came in to them ; declares, at Margaret Wal- 
lace's incoming, a goose was set down on the board ; and the de- 
ponent, perceiving that such entertainment would draw him to 
charges, he paid his choppine of wine and came his way, and 
left the rest of the company behind him ; and further he knows 
not." 

Some pains seem to have been taken in this vt^oman's defence, 
and the worst accusation against her appears to have been her 
acquaintance with Cristiane Grahame ; but the jury brought her 
in guilty, and she was strangled and burnt. 

In the May of 1623, a woman named Isobel Haldane made a 
" voluntary" confession at the sessions at Perth, in which she 
described the manner in which she cured diseases, chiefly by 
the use of crosses and charms such as those found in the old 
medical manuscripts. Being asked if she had any conversation 
with the fairy folk, she said that ten years before, while she was 
lying in her bed, she was taken forth she knew not how, and 
was carried to a hill-side, which opened, and she went in and 
remained there three daj^s, from Thursday to Sunday at noon. 
She met a man with a gray beard, who brought her forth again. 
This man with the gray beard, resembling the Thome Reid of 
a former story, was the person fi'om whom she received her 
knowledge of hidden things, and who imparted to her the art by 
which she worked her cures. She often deliA^ered people from 
the witchcraft of others. One Patrick Ruthven acknowledged 
that he had been bewitched, and that Isobel had cured him. 
" She came into the bed, and stretched herself above him, her 
head to his head, her hands over him, and so forth, mumbling 
some words, he knew not what they were." Isobel seems to 
have been famous for curing " bairns." She confessed that, for 
this purpose, she made three several cakes, every one of them 
of nine handfuls of meal obtained from nine women that were 



DEATH OF THOMAS GEE AVE. 349 

married maidens, and that she made a hole in the crown of 
every one of them, and put a bairn through it three times, in the 
name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." 

A man named Thomas Greave was burnt at the beginning of 
August, 1623. He was accused of causing sickness in some 
people, and curing it in others. His cures were performed with 
crosses and signs, and by washing the patient's sark, or shirt, 
in the water of a south-running stream, or with water from the 
holy well. He sometimes passed his patients through a hasp 
of yarn. He took one woman's sickness from her, and put it on 
a cow. " Item, about Martinmas, 1621, Elspeth Thome'sone, 
sister to John Thomesone, portioner of Petwar, being visited 
with a grievous sickness, the said Thomas came to her house in 
Corachie, where, after sighing and ' gripping' of her, he prom- 
ised to cure her thereof; and for this effect called for her sark, 
and desired two of her ' nearest friends' to go with him, like as 
John and William Thomesone, her brothers, being sent for, past 
with the said Thomas in the night season, from Corachie toward 
Burley, by the space of twelve miles, and enjoyned the two 
brothers not to speak a word all the way ; and whatever they 
heard or saw, no ways to be afraid, saying to them, it might be 
that they would hear great rumbling, and such uncouth and fear- 
ful apparitions, but nothing should annoy them. And at the 
ford by East Burley, in a south-running water, he there washed 
the sark ; during the time of the which washing of the sark, 
there was a great noise made by fowls, or the ' lyll beasts,' that 
arose and flittered in the water. And coming home with the 
sark, put the same upon hei", and cured her of her sickness." 

As I have before intimated, there may be some affinity be- 
tween this process and the modern cure by wet sheets ; in the 
instance of Thomas Greave the cold-water cure was punished 
with death. 

30 



350 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

CONFESSIONS OF ISOBEL GOWDIE. 

The extraordinary cases related in the last chapter give us 
but a faint notion of the immense number of prosecutions for the 
crime of sorcery which occurred in Scotland during the first 
half of the seventeenth century. The cases which came before 
the high court of justiciary were few indeed when compared with 
those which were disposed of no less summarily in the multi- 
tude of inferior courts throughout that kingdom. The super- 
stitious feelings of the Scottish clergy assisted the popular ima- 
gination, and it is not surprising if the persecution against this 
miserable class of people was increased, rather than otherwise, 
when the presbyterians were in power. Matthew Hopkins had 
his reflection in a number of Scottish witch-finders, or, as they 
were called, prickers, who gained their living by going from 
town to town to search suspected women or men for their marks, 
and we have even seen that on the eve of the Restoration they 
were sent for from Scotland to assist in witch prosecutions in 
the north of England. At this period, and in the years immedi- 
ately following the accession of Charles II., the mania seems to 
have suddenly extended itself in Scotland, and the year 1661 
was especially remarkable for the number of trials it witnessed. 
We are informed that on the 7th of November, in the year just 
mentioned, at one session of the superior court, no less than 
fourteen commissions were issued for trying witches in diff'erent 
parts of the country. A case which occurred in the spring of 
the year following, is deserving of particular notice for its pecu- 
liarities. 

The district about the village of Auldearn, on the coast of the 
little county of Nairn, contained at this time so many witches, that 
Satan was obliged for convenience to divide them into companies 
named covines, each covine consisting of thirteen persons. This 
number was anciently called the devil's dozen, from which we 
understand why still, wherever the popular superstitions leave 
their traces, it is looked upon as an unlucky number for a party 
at table, but another more useful individual has since taken the 
place of the evil one in the name applied to it. To one of these 



THE WITCHES OF AULDEARN. 351 

covines, which seems to have belonged especially to the village 
of Auldearn, belonged a woman of that place named Isobel Gow- 
die, who during the months of April and May, in the year 1662, 
made, without compulsion of any kind (as it is said in the docu- 
ment),' before the clergy and magistrates of the district, four sev- 
eral confessions, all agreeing together, though some of them 
were rather fuller in detail than others. 

Isobel Gowdie said that once as she was going between the 
farms of Drumdevin and the Heads, she was accosted by Satan, 
who made her promise to meet him at night. For some reason 
or other, in Scotland Satan preferred churches for the place of 
meeting of the witches, and on this occasion the rendezvous 
was to be in the kirk of Auldearn. Thither Isobel went on the 
night appointed, and she found a number of individuals who 
were well known to her in the kirk ; the evil one stood in the 
reader's desk, and held a black book in his hand. After being 
duly introduced to the company, the new convert was made to 
deny her baptism, and then, placing one hand on the crown of 
her head and the other imder the sole of her foot, she gave 
everything between them to the fiend. Margaret Brodie, of 
Auldearn, acted as her fostermother, and held her up to the devil 
to be baptized. He marked her on the shoulder, and sucked the 
blood, which" spouted" into his hand, and with this he sprinkled 
her on the head, rebaptizing her in his own name by the nickname 
of Janet. After this ceremony, the whole party separated. 
Shortly afterward the devil met Isobel again, alone, at the 
" New Wards" of Inshoch, and there the bond between them 
was completed. She described her new lord as a " mickle, 
black, rough man," with forked and cloven feet, which he some- 
times concealed by wearing boots or shoes. Sometimes he ap- 
peared in the shape of a deer, or roe, or other animal. 

To each covine was one female of more consideration than 
the others, Satan's favorite, who was chosen as the best looking 
of the younger witches, and she was called the maiden of the 
covine ; and there was a man, who was their officer. The 
witches had only power to do injuries of an inferior kind when 
the maiden was not with them. They met from time to time to 
dance at places which seem to have been under fairy influence, 
such as the hill of Earlseat, the mickle burn, and the Downie 
hills, generally one or two covines at a time, Avhere they danced ; 
but they had larger general meetings toward the end of each 
quarter of a year. Jane Martin, a young lass of Auldearn, was 
the maiden of the covine to which Isobel Gowdie belonged. We 



352 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

have seen that in her intercourse with the evil one, each witch 
was known by a new name. Thus Jane Martin was named 
" Over-the-dyke-with-it," because she used to sing these words 
when she was dancing with the devil. Her mother, Isobel Nic- 
oll, went by the name of Bessie Rule; Margaret Wilson was 
named Pickle-nearest-the-wind ; Bessie Wilson's name was 
Through-the-corn-yard ; Elspet Nishie was named Bessie Bauld ; 
and Bessie Hay rejoiced in the name of Able-and-stout. Their 
familiar spirits, who were distinguished by the color of their 
liveries, had names equally singular. Isobel Gowdie's own fa- 
miliar was called Saunders-the-red-reaver, and was clothed in 
black ; one of them had a spirit called Thomas-a-fairie ; Mar- 
garet Wilson's spirit had a grass-green dress, and was called 
Swein ; Bessie Wilson's spirit was Rorie, dressed in yellow ; 
that of Isobel Nicoll was Roaring-lion, and his color sea-green ; 
that of Margaret Brodie was called Robert-the-rule, and dressed 
in a sad dress ; Bessie Wilson's familiar had the strange name 
of Thief-of-hell-wait-upon-her ; Elspet Nishie's was Hendrie 
Laing ; the familiar of Bessie Hay (old Able-and-stout) was 
named Robert-the-Jakis, and was always " clothed in dun, and 
seems aged ; he is ane glaiked gowked spirit." Jane Martin, 
the maiden of the covine, had a spirit named M'Hector, Vi'ho 
was a "young-like" devil, and his color grass-green. These 
spirits were much smaller than the devil who' presided at -their 
meetings. 

Isobel said that they sometimes went into the Downie hills, 
where they found a fair and large " brawe" room, where it was 
daylight. There she got meat from the queen of faerie more 
than she could eat. The queen was " brawlie" clothed in white 
linen, and in white and brov.- n clothes. The king of faerie was 
a " brawe" man, well-favored, and broad-faced. " There," says 
Isobel, "was elf-bulls rowtting and skoylling up and down, and 
affrighted me." She alluded repeatedly to the fear which she 
always felt on seeing these elf-bulls. In the caverns of the 
Downie hills, Isobel Gowdie saw the " elf-boys" making the 
elf-arrowheads. These elf-boys were " little ones, hollow and 
boss-backed [Immp-backed]; they spoke gowstie-like." The 
devil shaped the arrow-heads with his own hand, and gave 
them to the elf-boj's, who sharpened and " dighred" them with a 
sharp thing like a packing-needle. When they were finished, 
the devil delivered them to the witches, saying : — 

Shoot tliese in my name, 

Aiid they shall not go heal hame {whole home). 



SABBATH QUARRELS. 353 

And when the witch shot at anybody with them, she said : — 

I shoot yon man in the devil's name, 

He shall not win heal bame ! 

And this shall be all so true, 

There shall not be one bit of him on Hew (alive) ! 

When they shot the arrow-heads at their victims, they " spang" 
them from their thumb-nails ; sometimes they missed their ob- 
ject, but if they touched they carried certain death, even if the 
victim were cased in armor. 

The account of what passed at the sabbaths of these Scottish 
witches is very imperfect, and the little that is told will be better 
passed over. The arch-fiend seems to have taken great delight 
in beating his subjects cruelly wilh ropes and thongs, and he re- 
sented bitterly any act of disrespect. " Sometimes among our- 
selves," says Isobel Gowdie, " we would be calling him Black 
John, or the like, and he would ken it, and hear us well enough ; 
and he even then come to us and say, ' I ken wele eneugh what 
ye were saying of me.' And then he would beat and buffet us 
very sore." They were often beaten for absence from the meet- 
ings, or for neglect when present. Some bore their punishment 
quietly, but others would resist, and there were some beldames 
in the company who didnot hesitate to exchange blows with Sa- 
tan. Alexander Elder, of Earlseat, was often beaten. " He is 
but soft, and could never defend himself in the least, but ' greit' 
[lament] and cry when he would be scourging him. Margaret 
Wilson would defend herself finely, and cast up her hands to 
keep the strokes off her ; and Bessie Wilson would speak crusty 
with her tongue, and would be belling again to him stoutly. On 
the whole, Satan appears to have been but an ill master, for he 
was easily otfended, and " when he M'ould be angry at us, he 
would grin at us like a dog, as if he would swallow us up." How- 
ever, as a peace-offering at the end of the meeting, he sometimes 
gave them the " brawest like money that ever was coined S" but 
if they had the misfortune to keep it more than twenty-four 
hours in their possession, they found it "was nothing but horse- 
dung ! 

Isobel Gowdie stated that when they went to the 'meetings, 
they took a straw or a iDean-stalk, placed it between iheir feet, 
and said — 

Horse and hattoct, horse and go, 
Horse and pellattis, ho, ho ! 

Then they were immediately carried into the air " as straws 
would fly upon a highway." If it were at night, and the witch 

30* 



354 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

were afraid that her husband might miss her from his bed, she 
took a besom or three-legged stool, placed it beside him in bed, 
and said thrice — 

T lay down this besom for stool] ia the devil's name, 
Let it not stii- till 1 come agam — 

" and it immediately seems a woman beside our husbands." They 
often travelled in this way by day, and then it was that they 
amused themselves by shooting people with the elf-arrowheads ; 
and people who see straws flying about the air in a whirlwind on 
a fine day, are recommended to bless themselves devoutly, be- 
cause if they omit that precaution they are liable to be shot by 
the witches who ride on them. " Any that are shot by us," Iso- 
bel informs us, "their souls will go to heaven, but their bodies 
will remain with us, and will fly as horses to us, as small as 
straws." Isobei Gowdie confessed to having killed many peo- 
ple in this manner. The first time she went to her covine was 
to PloLighlands, where she shot a man between the " plough- 
stilts," and he presently fell on his face to the ground. The 
devil gave her an arrow to shoot at a woman in the fields, which 
she did, and the victim dropped down dead. As they w^ere riding 
one day, Isobei by the side of Satan, and Margaret Brodie and 
Bessie Hay in close company with them, they met Mr. Harry 
Forbes, the minister of Auldearn, going to Moynes, on which the 
devil gave Margaret Brodie an arrow to shoot at him. Marga- 
ret shot and missed her mark, and the arrow was taken up again 
by Satan ; but when she ofl'ered to shoot again, he said, " No, 
we can not have his life this time." Presently afterward they 
saw the laird of Park, and the devil gave Isobei an arrow. 
She shot at him as he was crossing a burn, and, perhaps owing 
to this circumstance, missed him, for which Bessie Hay gave her 
" a great cuff"." 

The witches seem to have entertained an especial hostility 
toward these two gentlemen. In the winter of 1660, Mr. Forbes 
was sick, it appears, in consequence of a conspiracy of these 
enemies. They made a mixture of the galls, flesh, and entrails 
of toads, grains of barley, parings of finger and toe nails, the 
liver of a hare, and " bits of clouts." These ingredients were 
mixed together, and seethed or boiled all night, in water. Satan 
was with them during this process, and they repeated after him, 
thrice each time, the words — ■ 

He is lying in his bed, he is lying sick and sair, 

Let him lie intill his bed two months and three days mair. 



THE LAIRD OF PARK. 355 



And then — 



Let him lie in bis bed, let him lie intill it sick and sair, 
Let him lie intill his bed two mouths and three days mair. 

And then finally — 

He shall lie in his bed, he shall lie sick and sair, 

He shall lie intill his bed two months and three days mair. 

At night they went into Forbes's chamber to swing this mixture 
over him as he lay sick in bed, but for some reason or other they 
were not able to do it. They now chose one of their covine 
who was most intimate and familiar with the minister, which 
happened to be Bessie Hay, who, as they could not injure him 
by night, was to visit him by day, and swing the noxious mix- 
ture over him ; but she failed, because there were some other 
" worthy persons" with him at the time, though she " swung" a 
little of the mixture on the bed where he lay. 

Mr. Harry Forbes appears to have received no serious injury 
from the witches, as he was one of those who sat in court to 
hear Isobel's confession. The laird of Park was less fortunate 
in his family, if he escaped in his person. A meeting was held 
at the house of John Taylor of Auldearn, at which the devil was 
present with Isobel Gowdie, John Taylor and his wife, and one 
or two others, for the purpose of making a picture of clay,.to de- 
stroy the laird of Park's male children. John Taylor brought 
home the clay in " his plaidnewk" (a corner of his plaid), and 
they broke it into fine powder, and passed it through a sieve. 
Then they poured water on it to make a paste, and " wrought it 
very sore like rye-bowt." As they threw the water in, they said, 
in the devil's name — 

We pom- in this water among this meal. 

For lang dwining [languishing] and ill heal; 

We put it into the fire. 

That it may be burnt with stick and stowre ; 

It shall be burnt, with our will, 

As any stickle [stubble] upon a hill. 

"The devil," says Isobel, "taught us these words, and when we 
had learned them, we all fell down upon our bare knees, and our 
hair about our eyes, and our hands lifted up, looking steadfastly 
upon the devil, still saying the words thrice over, till it was 
made." They moulded the paste into the figure of a male-child, 
having all its members complete, and its hands folded down by 
its sides ; and they laid it with the face to the fire till it was al- 
most dry, then in the devil's name they put it in the fire, and let 
it remain till it was red like a coal, when it was drawn out with 



35G SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

the same ceremony. This image was intrusted to the care of 
John Taylor and his wife ; it was kept wrapped np in a " clout," 
in a cradle of clay, and hung up in a " knag" in their house. As 
often as they wanted to kill a male-child of the laird of Park, 
they took it down, wet it, and roasted it every other day till the 
child died, and then put it away again ; and as soon as another 
male-child was born to him, they let it live six months, and then 
destroyed it by the same process. We are told in the confession 
that " till it be broken, it will be the death of all the male-chil- 
dren that the laird of Park will ever get. Cast it over a kirk it 
will not break, till it be broken with an axe, or some such like 
thing, by a man's hand. If it be not broken, it will last a hun- 
dred years." This seems to be a remnant of the early belief 
which led the Teutonic invaders to destroy the Roman statuary : 
we continually find, on Roman sites, bronzes that have been inten- 
tionally mutilated with an axe, or some other sharp instrument. 

These Scottish witches appear to have had no eating and 
drinking at their sabbaths, but they went for this purpose into the 
houses of the lairds and gentlemen round about, to feast by night 
on the provisions which were always found there in plenty. 
They went thus into the house of the earl of Murray himself. 
On the Candlemas before this confession was made, they visited 
Grangehill, the house of Brodie of Lethin, where they got " meat 
and drink enough." On these occasions the devil always sat at 
the head of the table, and the maiden of the covine sat next to 
him, and was served first and best. The grace they said before 
meat was as follows : — 

We eat this meat in the devil's name, 

With sorrnw, and '' sych" [sighing], and mickle shame; 

We shall destroy house and hold, 

Both sheep and neat iutill the fold. 

Little good shall come to the fore 

Of all the rest of the little store. 

In these excursions the witches did not always go in their 
own semblances, for they had the power of transforming them- 
selves into the shape of any animals except lambs or doves, 
which, as emblems of innocence, they might not assume. Isobel 
Gowdie describes minutely the process of transformation. When 
the witch would change herself into a hare, the form that appears 
to have been adopted most commonly, she said thrice — 

I shall go into a bare, 

With sorrow, and sych, and mickle care; 

I shall go in the devil's name, 

Ay till 1 come home again — 



TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE WITCHES. 357 

" and instantly we start in a hare." When they wished to return 
to their own shape, they repeated thrice the words — 

Have, hare, God send the care ! 

I am in a hare's likeness just now, 

But I shall be in a woman's likeness even now. 

When they chose the likeness of a cat, which was the next fa- 
vorite form, they said thrice — 

I shall go intill a cat, 

With sorrow, and sych, and a black shot ; 
And I shall go in the devil's name, 
Ay till I come home again. 

The formula was similarly varied for other animals. As thus 
transformed they passed by the houses of other witches, they 
called them out, and they came in similar shapes. Travelling in 
these assumed shapes was not always safe. Isobel Gowdie, Avho 
often went in the form of a hare, was sent one day, about daybreak, 
in this shape, with one of Satan's messages to some of her neigh- 
bors, and on her way met with the servants of Patrick Pepley of 
Killhill, who happened to have his hounds with them. The latter 
immediately gave chase to the transformed witch, and ran after 
her a long course, until, weary and hard pressed, she gained her 
own house, and ran behind a chest. The door being open, the 
hounds followed her, but they happening to go to the other side 
of the chest, she had just time to run out and enter the house of 
a neighbor, where she was able to say the disenchanting charm, 
and recovered her shape. She said that, while thus transformed, 
the hounds had not power to kill them, but if they chanced to be 
bitten, the wound remained after they had recovered their natu- 
ral shape. " When we would be in the shape of cats, we did 
nothing but cry and ' wraw' [a very expressive word Tor cater- 
wauling], and ' rywing' [tearing], and, as it v/ere, worrying one 
another ; and when we come to our own shapes again, we will 
find the scratches and ' rywes' on our skins very sore /" About 
the summer of 1659, "they went in the shape of rooks to the 
house of Mr. Robert Donaldson, where the devil, with John Tay- 
lor and his v/ife, went down the kitchen chimney, and perched 
on the crook, or iron on which the pot was suspended over the 
fire." The others seem not to have liked this mode of entry, and 
they waited till their friends opened a window, and then they all 
went into the house, and feasted on beef and drink, " but did no 
more harm." 

Isobel Gowdie repeated in her confessions a great number of 



353 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

the verses which they used in their incantations, some of which 
are curious. Their method of raising a tempestuous wind was 
to take a rag of cloth, wet it in water, and then take a beetle 
(with which washerwomen beat their linen) and knock it on the 
stone, repeating thrice — 

I knock this rag upon this stane, 

To raise the wind in the devil's name ! 

It shall not lie until I please again ! 

To appease the Avind, they dried the rag, and said — 

We lay the wind in the devil's name, 

It shall not rise lill I like to raise it again ! 

If the wind, on this appeal, did not instantly abate, the witch 
called her spirit, and said to him, " Thief, thief, conjure the wind, 
and cause it to lie !" Isobel said that they had no power over 
rain. One of the witches, whose husband sold cattle, used to 
put a swallow's feather in the hide of the beast, and say thrice 
over it, before it went — 

I put out this beef in the devil's name, 

That mickle silver and good price came hame !" 

They had many charms for curing diseases, as well as for 
sending them. It was common with them, by such charms, to 
appropriate to themselves the property or gain of others. When 
they wished to " take the fruit of fishes" from the fishermen, they 
went to the shore before the boat came in, and standing on the 
brink of the water, they said thrice — 

The fishers are gone to the sea 
And they will bring home fish to me ; 
They will bring them hame intill the boat, 
• But they shall get of them but the smaller sort. 

As soon as the boat. arrived, they stole a fish, or bought or 
begged one, and with it came to them " all the fruit of the whole 
fishes in the boat, and the fishes that the fishermen themselves 
will have will be but froth." 

At Lammas (the first of August), the watches usually appropri- 
ated to themselves, in a similar manner, the corn and other prod- 
uce of the fields, though the particular ceremonies for this pur- 
pose varied. Isobel Gowdie told, in her confession, how, soon 
after her conversion to sorcery, she, with John Taylor and his 
wife, and some others, met in the kirkyard of Nairn, and raised 
from its grave the corpse of an unchristened child. With this 
and some other ingredients, such as parings of finger and toe 



CONFESSIONS OF ISOBEL GOWDIE. 359 

nails, grains of different sorts, and leaves of colework, chopped 
very small, she formed a noxious mixture ; and going to the end 
of the cornfields opposite the mill of Nairn, they threw some on 
the land. By this means, while the farmers reaped nothing but 
straw, all the grain was conveyed to the secret storehouse of the 
witches, who usually kept it there till the following Christmas 
or Easter, and then shared it among the covine. She further 
stated that one night before the Candlemas of 1661, she went 
with the other witches to some fields " be-east" Kinloss, where 
they yoked a plongh of paddocks, or frogs ; the braces were of 
quickens (quick or dog grass), and a riglen's or ram's horn was 
the coulter. The officer of their covine, one John Young, was 
driver, while the devil held the plough. Thus they went sev- 
eral times about, all they of the covine going up and down with 
it, praying Satan for the fruit of that land, "and that thistles and 
briers might grow there" — that is, that this might be the only 
fruit reserved to the owners of the land. When they wished to 
take a cow's milk, they took tow or hemp, and twined or plaited 
it the wrong way, in the devil's name. They then drew the 
rope thus made in between the cow's two hind feet, and out be- 
tween the fore feet, always in the name of the arch-fiend, and 
milked the rope. To restore the cow its milk, they must cut 
the rope in two. They had similar methods of taking and trans- 
ferring the strength of people's ale, and of abstracting various 
other things. Isobel Gowdie further stated that, when any one 
of them fell into the hands of justice, she lost all her power, 
which was thereupon shared among the rest of her covine, in 
addition to that which they already possessed. 

We are not informed what became of Isobel Gowdie ; but her 
case must have been considered, at least in the district where it 
occurred, an important one, for the examinations were continued 
through two months. Her first confession is dated on the iSth 
of April, 1662, and her last bears date of the 27th of May. Her 
most intimate associates appear to have been John Taylor and 
his wife, the latter of whom made a confession corroborating in 
some important points, especially in the history of the conspiracy 
against the laird of Park, those of Isobel Gowdie. These con- 
fessions have been printed entire by Robert Pitcairn. 

Such were the confessions of Isobel Gowdie of Auldearn. If, 
as we are assured, they were purely voluntary, we must imagine 
that this woman was laboring under some strange delusion of the 
mind, and that she really believed the story she told. From the 
circumstantial character of her narrative, we can hardly avoid 



360 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

supposing that there were persons so far influenced by the popu- 
lar superstitions, that they joined together in practising such 
ceremonies as are above described, and that they really believed 
in their efficacy. That such delusion was possible on an exten- 
sive scale is shown by the celebrated example of Major Weir 
and his sister, who were executed less than ten years after the 
date of Isobel's confessions. This man had distinguished him- 
self by his extraordinary zeal in the cause of the covenant, and 
had been appointed, in 1649, with the rank of major, to command 
the city-guard of Edinburgh. He lived in a retired manner with 
a maiden sister. Both professed in their utmost rigor the severe 
doctrines of the party whose cause they had espoused, and the 
major, who always appeared in his ordinary behavior ireserved 
and melancholy, was especially endowed with the gift of prayer, 
which made him a welcome visiter to the side of a sick-bed. Af- 
ter the restoration, the melancholy of the major and his sister 
appeared to have become more and more sombre, until it settled 
into a kind of lunacy, and they believed themselves guilty of the 
most revolting crimes which disgrace humanity. The major 
now began to make extraordinary confessions to his friends, de- 
claring that his sins were of that character that he had no hopes 
of salvation, unless he should be brought to a shameful end in 
this world. His presbyterian friends did their utmost to restrain 
him, alarmed at the scandal that Weir's conduct was likely to 
bring on their religion ; but the affair soon reached the ears of 
the I'oyalists, who were just as glad to seize upon any occasion 
of hurting the cause of their opponents. Major Weir and his 
sister were arrested, and both made what was called a full con- 
fession, involving crimes of a degrading character. As these 
were most of them vices which the king's party had long been 
in the habit of ascribing to their religious adversaries, we are 
perhaps justified in believing that they may have taken advantage 
of their state of mind to suggest to them some of these self-accu- 
sations. They found two or three witnesses to those parts of his 
story which were most improbable. His sister declared that he 
had a magical staff, which he always carried with him, and which 
gave him eloquence in prayer. She said that once a person 
called upon them at noonday with a fiery chariot, visible only to 
themselves, and took them to visit a friend at Dalkeith, where 
her brother received information, by supernatural means, of the 
event of the battle of Worcester, and that she herself had inter- 
course with the queen of the fairies, who assisted her in spinning 
an unusual quantity of yarn. 



MAJOR WEIR AND HIS SISTER.. 361 

There was a woman who lived in the West Bow, at no great 
distance from Major Weir's house, who gave the following evi- 
dence. She was a substantial merchant's wife, and " being very 
desirous to hear him pray, for that end spoke to some of her 
neighbors, that when he came to their house she might be sent 
for. This was done, but he could never be persuaded to open 
his mouth before her — no, not to bless a cup of ale ; he either 
remained mute, or up with his staff and away. Some few days 
before he discovered himself, this gentlewoman coming from the 
castle-hill, where her husband's niece was lying-in of a child, 
about midnight perceived about the Bow-head three women in 
the windows, shouting, laughing, and clapping their hands. The 
gentlewoman went forward, till just at Major Weir's door, there 
arose, as from the street, a woman about the height of two ordi- 
nary females, and stepped forward. The gentlewoman, not as 
yet excessively feared, bid her maid step on, if by the lantern 
they could see what she was ; but haste what they could, this 
long-legged spectre was still before them, moving her body with 
a vehement cachination — a great, unmeasurable laughter. At 
this rate the two strove for place, till the giantess came to a nar- 
row lane in the Bow, commonly called the Stinking-close, into 
which she turning, and the gentlewoman looking after her, per- 
ceived the close full of flaming torches (she could give them no 
other name), and as it had been a great multitude of people, sten- 
toriously laughing, and gaping with tahees of laughter. This 
sight, at so dead a time of the night, no people being in the win- 
dows belonging to the close, made her and her servant haste 
home, declaring all what they saw to the rest of the family, but 
more passionately to her husband. And though sick with fear, 
yet she went the next morning with her maid to view the noted 
places of her former night's walk, and at the close inquired who 
lived thore. It was answered. Major Weir ; the honest couple 
now rejoicing that to Weir's devotion they never said amen." 
When Major Weir's sister was brought to the place of execution, 
and saw the multitude of spectators, she exclaimed : " Many 
weep and lament for a poor old wretch like me ; but, alas ! few 
are weeping for a broken covenant." A clear proof of the state 
of mind in which these miserable people suffered. 

31 



362 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

THE WITCHES OF MOHRA IN SWEDEN. 

In general the countries of northern Europe appear to have 
been less subject to these extensive witch-prosecutions than the 
south, although there the ancient popular superstitions reigned 
in great force. Probably this latter circumstance contributed not 
a little to the extraordinary character assumed by a case of this 
nature, which, during the years 1669 and 1670, caused a great 
sensation throughout Sweden, and drew also the attention of 
other countries. It began in a district which would seem by its 
name of Elfdale to have been the peculiar domain of the fairies, 
and the chief actors in it were children, whom, according to the 
old popular belief, the fairies were always on the look out to 
carry away. 

The villages of Mohra and Elfdale are situated in the dales 
of the mountainous districts of the central part of Sweden. In 
the first of the years above-mentioned, a strange report went 
abroad that the children of the neighborhood were carried away 
nightly to a place they called Blockula, where they were re- 
ceived by Satan in person ; and the children themselves, who 
were the authors of the report, pointed out to numerous women 
who they said were witches and carried them thither. We 
have no information as to the manner in which this affair arose, 
or how it was first made public, but within a short space of time 
nearly all the children of the district became compromised in it, 
and agreed in nearly the same story. They asserted in the 
strongest manner the fact of their being carried away in multi- 
tudes to the place of ghostly rendezvous, and we are told that 
the pale and emaciated appearance of these juvenile victims 
gave consistency to their statements, although there was the 
testimony of their own parents that during their pretended ab- 
sence they had never been missed from home. 

Some of the incidents in this singular and tragical case seem 
to have been borrowed from the witchcraft-cases in France and 
Germany, although it is not very easy to understand how this 
could have been the case in what was evidently a very retired 
part of the country. The minister seems to have shared largely 



THE EXAMINATION. 363 

in. the delusion, and he may perhaps have been involuntarily the 
means of working the story of the children into its finished form. 
The alarm and terror in the district became so great, that a re- 
port was at last made to the king, who nominated commission- 
ers, partly clergy and partly laymen to inquire into the extraoi*- 
dinary circumstances which had been brought under his notice, 
and these commissioners arrived in Mohra and announced their 
intention of opening their proceedings on the 13th of August, 
1670. 

On the 12th of August, the commissioners met at the parson- 
age-house, and heard the complaints of the minister and several 
people of the better class, who told them of the miserable con- 
dition they were in, and prayed that by some means or other 
they might be delivered from the calamity. They gravely told 
the commissioners that by the help of witches some hundred of 
their children had been drawn to Satan, who had been seen to 
go in a visible shape through the country, and to appear daily 
to the people ; the poorer sort of them, they said, he had seduced 
by feasting them wnth meat and drink. Prayers and humilia- 
tions, it appears, had been ordered by the church authorities, 
and were strictly observed, but the inhabitants of the village 
lamented before the commissioners that they had been of no 
avail, and that their children were carried away by the fiend in 
spite of their devotions. They therefore earnestly begged that 
the witches who had been the cause of the evil might be rooted 
out, and that they might thus regain their former rest and quiet- 
ness, " the rather," they said, " because the children which used 
to be carried away in the country or district of Elfdale, since 
some witches had been burnt there, remained unmolested." This 
certainly was a cogent argument for persecution. 

The 13th of August was the last day appointed for prayer and 
humiliation, and before opening their commission the commis- 
sioners went to church, " where there appeared a considerable 
assembly of both young and old. The children could read most 
of them, and sing psalms, and so could the women, though not 
with any great zeal and fervor. There were preached two ser- 
mons that day, in which the miserable case of those people that 
suffered themselves to be deluded by the devil was laid open ; 
and these sermons were at last concluded with very fervent 
prayer. The public worship being over, all the people of the 
town were called together in the parson's house, near three 
thousand of them. Silence being commanded, the king's com- 
mission was read publicly in the hearing of them all, and they 



364 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

were charged, under very great penalties, to conceal nothing of 
what they knew, and to say nothing but the truth, those espe- 
cially who were guilty, that the children might be delivered from 
the clutches of the devil; they all promised obedience; the 
guilty feignedly, but the guiltless weeping and crying bi<tterly." 

The coiumissioners entered upon their duties on the next day 
with the utmost diligence, and the result of their misguided zeal 
formed one of the most remarkable examples of cruel and re- 
morseless persecution that stain the annals of sorcery. No less 
than threescore and ten inhabitants of the village and district of 
Mohra, three-and-twenty of whom made confessions, were con- 
demned and executed. One woman pleaded that she was with 
child, and the rest denied their guilt, and these were sent to 
Fahluna, where most of them were afterward put to death. 
Fifteen children were among those who suffered death, and 
thirty-six more, of different ages between nine and sixteen, were 
forced to run the gauntlet, and be scourged on the hands at the 
church-door every Sunday for one year ; while twenty more, 
who had been drawn into these practices more unwillingly, and 
v/ere very young, were condemned to be scourged with rods 
upon their hands for three successive Sundays at the church- 
door. The number of the children accused was about three 
hundred. 

It appears that the commissioners began by 1,aking the con- 
fessions of the children, and then they confronted them with the 
witches whom the children accused as their seducers. The latter, 
to use the words of the authorized report, having " most of them 
children with them, which they had either seduced or attempted 
to seduce, some seven years of age, nay, from four to sixteen 
years," now appeared before the commissioners. " Some of the 
children complained lamentably of the misery and mischief they 
were forced sometimes to suffer of the devil and the witches." 
Being asked, whether they were sure, that they Avere at any 
time carried away by the devil, they all replied in the affirma- 
tive. " Hereupon the witches themselves were asked, whether 
the confessions of those children were true, and admonished to 
confess the truth, that they might turn away from the devil unto 
the living God. At first, most of them did very stiffly, and with- 
out shedding the least tear, defly it, though much against their 
will and inclination. After this the children were examined 
every one by themselves, to see whether their confessions did 
agree or no, and the commissioners found that all of them, ex- 
cept some very little ones, which could not tell all the circum- 



THE WITCHES CONFESS. 365 

stances, did punctually agree in their confessions of particulars. 
In the meanwhile, the commissioners that were of the clergy 
examined the witches, but could not bring them to any confes- 
sion, all continuing steadfast in their denials, till at last some of 
them burst out into tears, and their confession agreed with what 
the children said ; and these expressed their abhorrence of the 
fact, and begged pardon, adding that the devil, whom they 
called Locyta, had stopped the mouths of some of them, so loath 
was he to part with his prey, and had stopped the ears of others ; 
and being now gone from them, they could no longer conceal 
it, for they had now perceived his treachery." 

The various confessions, not only of the witches and children 
in Mohra, but of those of Elfdale, presented a remarkable uni- 
formity, even in their more minute details. They all asserted 
that they were carried to a place called Blockula, although they 
appear to have been ignorant where or at how great a distance it 
lay, and that they were there feasted by the arch-fiend. The 
confession of the witches of Elfdale ran thus : " We of the prov- 
ince of Elfdale do confess, that we used to go to a gravel-pit, 
which lies hard by a cross-way, and there we put on a vest over 
our heads, and then danced round ; and after this ran to the cross- 
way, and called the devil thrice, first with a still voice, the sec- 
ond time somewhat louder, and the third time very loud, with 
these words, ' Antecessor, come and carry us to Blockula.' 
Whereupon immediately he used to appear ; but in different hab- 
its ; but for the most part we saw him in a gray coat and red and 
blue stockings ; he had a red beard, a high-crowned hat, with 
linen of divers colors wrapt about it, and long garters upon his 
stockings. [It is very remarkable, says the report, that the devil 
never appears to the witches with a sword by his side.] Then he 
asked us, whether we would serve him with soul and body. If 
we were content to do so, he set us on a beast which he had there 
ready, and carried us over churches and high walls, and after 
all we came to a green meadow where Blockula lies. We must 
procure some scrapings of altars, and filings of church-clocks ; 
and then he gave us a horn, with a salve in it, wherewith we do 
anoint ourselves, and a saddle with a hammer and a wooden nail, 
thereby to fix the saddle ; whereupon we call upon the devil, and 
away we go." 

The witches of Mohra made similar statements ; and being 
asked whether they were sure of a real personal transportation, 
and whether they were awake when it took place, they all an- 
swered in the affirmative ; and they said that the devil sometimes 

31* 



366 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

laid something down in their place that was very like them ; but 
one of them asserted that he did only take away " her strength," 
while her body lay still upon the ground, though sometimes he 
took away her body also. They were then asked, how they 
could go with their bodies through chimneys and unbroken panes 
of glass ; to which they replied, that the devil did first remove 
all that might hinder them in their flight, and so they had room 
enough to go. Others, who were asked how they were able to 
carry so many children with them, said that they came into the 
chamber where the children lay asleep, and laid hold of them, 
upon which they awoke ; they then asked them whether they 
would go to a feast with them. To which some answered. Yes ; 
others, No, " yet they were all forced to go ;" they only gave the 
children a shirt, and a coat, and doublet, which was either red 
or blue, and so they set them upon a beast of the devil's provi- 
ding, and then they rode away. The children confessed that 
this was true, and some of them added, that because they had 
very fine clothes put upon them, they were very willing to go. 
Some of the children said that they concealed it from their pa- 
rents, while others made no secret of their visits to Blockula. 
" The witches declared, moreover, that till of late, they had nev- 
er power to carry away children, but only this year and the last ; 
and the devil did at that time force them to it ; that heretofore it was 
sufficient to carry but one of their own children, or a stranger's 
child with them, which happened seldom ; but now he did plague 
them and whip them, if they did not procure him many children, 
insomuch that they had no peace nor quiet for him. And where- 
as that formerly one journey a week would serve their turn from 
their own town to the place aforesaid, now they were forced to run 
to other towns and places for children, and that they brought with 
them some fifteen, some sixteen children every night." 

The journey to Blockula was not always made with the same 
kind of conveyance ; they commonly used men, beasts, even 
spits and posts, according as they had opportunity. They pre- 
ferred, however, I'iding upon goats, and if they had more chil- 
dren with them than the animal could conveniently carrj^, they 
elongated its back by means of a spit anointed with their magi- 
cal ointment. It was further stated, that if the children did at 
any time name the names of those, either man or woman, thiit 
had been with them, and had carried them away, they were again 
carried by force, either to Blockula or the cross-way, and there 
beaten, insomuch that some of them died of it ; and this some of 
the witches confessed, and added, that now they were exceed- 



DESCRIPTION OF BLOCKULA. 367 

ingly troubled and tortured in their minds for it." One tiling 
was wanting to confirm this circumstance of their confession. 
The marks of the whip could not be found on the persons of the 
victims, except on one boy, who had some wounds and holes in 
his back, that were given him with thorns ; but the witches said 
they would quickly vanish." 

The confessions were very minute in regard to the effects of 
the journey on the children after their return. " They are," says 
the history, " exceedingly weak ; and if any be carried over night, 
they can not recover themselves the next day, and they often fall 
into fits ; the coming of which they know by an extraordinary 
paleness that seizes on the children, and when a fit comes upon 
them, they lean upon their mother's arms, who sits up with them, 
sometimes all night, and when they observe the paleness, shake the 
children, but to no purpose. They observe, further, that their chil- 
dren's breasts grow cold at such times, and they take sometimes a 
burning candle and stick it in their hair, which yet is not burned 
by it. They swoon upon this paleness, which swoon lasteth some- 
time half an hour, sometimes an hour, som.etimes two hours, and 
when the children come to themselves again, they mourn and 
lament, and groan most miserably, and beg exceedingly to be 
eased. This the old men declared upon oath before the judges, 
and called the inhabitants of the town to witness, as persons that 
had most of them experience of the strong symptoms of their 
children." 

One little girl in Elfdale confessed that, happening accidental- 
ly to utter the name of Jesus, as she was carried away, she fell 
suddenly upon the ground, and received a hurt in her side, which 
the devil presently healed, and away he carried her. 

A boy of the same district said that one day he was carried 
away with his mistress ; and to perform the journey he took his 
father's horse out of the meadow, where it was feeding, and upon 
his return, she let the horse go into her own ground. The next 
morning the boy's father sought for the horse, and not finding it 
in its place, imagined that it was lost, till the boy told him the 
whole story, and the father found the horse according to his child's 
statement. 

The account they gave of Blockula was, that it was situated 
in a large meadow, like a plain sea, " wherein you can see no 
end." The house they met at had a great gate painted with 
many divers colors. Through this gate they Vi^ent into a little 
meadow distinct from the other, and here they turned their ani- 
mals to graze. When they had made use of men for their beasts 



368 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

of burthen, they set them up against the wall in a state of help- 
less slumber, and there they remained till wanted for the home- 
ward flight. In a very large room of this house, stood a long ta- 
ble, at which the witches sat down ; and adjoining to this room 
was another chamber, where there were " lovely and delicate 
beds." 

As soon as they arrived at Blockula, the visiters were required 
to deny their baptism, and devote themselves body and soul to 
Satan, whom they promised to serve faithfully. Hereupon he cut 
their fingers, and they wrote their name with blood in his book. 
He then caused them to be baptized anew, by priests appointed 
for that purpose. Upon this the devil gave them a purse, wherein 
there were filings of clocks, with a big stone tied to it, which 
they threw into the water, and said, " As these filings of the clock 
do never return to the clock, from which they were taken, so 
may my soul never return to heaven !" Another difliculty arose 
in verifying this statement, that few of the children had any 
marks on their fingers to show where they had been cut. But 
here again the story was helped by a girl who had her finger 
much hurt, and who declared, that because she would not stretch 
out her finger, the devil in anger had thus wounded it. 

When these ceremonies were completed, the witches sat down 
at the table, those whom the fiend esteemed most being placed 
nearest to him ; but the children were made to stand near the 
door, where he himself gave them meat and drink. Perhaps we 
may look for the origin of this part of the story in the pages of 
Pierre de Lancre. The food with which the visiters to Block- 
ula were regaled, consisted of broth, with coleworts and bacon 
in it ; oatmeal bread spread with butter ; milk, and cheese. 
Sometimes, they said, it tasted very well, and sometimes very ill. 
After meals they went to dancing, and it was one peculiarity of 
these northern witches' sabbaths, that the dance was usually fol- 
lowed by fighting. Those of Elfdale confessed that the devil 
used to play upon a harp before them. Another peculiarity of 
these northern witches was, that children resulted from their in- 
tercouse with Satan, and these children having married together, 
became the parents of toads and serpents. Satan loved to play 
tricks upon his subjects. One day he pretended to be dead, and, 
singularly enough, there was a great lamentation among the 
witches at Blockula; but he soon showed signs of life. If he 
had a mind to be merry with them, he let them all ride upon 
spits before him, and finished by taking the spits and beating them 
black and blue, and then laughed at them. Then he told them 



THE WITCHES OF SWEDEN. 369 

that the day of judgment was at hand, and set them to build a 
great house of stone, promising that in his house he would pre- 
serve them from God's wrath, and cause them to enjoy the great- 
est delights and pleasures ; but while they Av^re hard at work, he 
caused a great part of the work to fall down upon them, and some 
of the witches were severely hurt, which made him laugh. 

Some of the children spoke of a very great demon like a drag- 
on, with fire round about him, and bound with an iron chain ; 
and the devil told them that if they confessed anything, he would 
set that great devil loose upon them, whereby all Sweden should 
come into great danger. They said that the devil had a church 
there like that in the village of Mohra. When he heard that the 
commissioners were coming, he told the witches they should not 
fear them, for he would certainly kill them all. And they con- 
fessed some of them had attempted to murder the commissioners, 
but had not been successful. Some of the children improved 
upon these stories, and told of " a white angel, which used to 
forbid them what the devil had bid them do, and told that these 
things should not last long ; what had been done had been 
permitted, because of the sin and wickedness of the people 
and their parents ; and that the carrying away of the children 
should be made manifest. And they added, that this white an- 
gel would place himself sometimes at the door between the witches 
and the children, and that when they came to Blockula he pulled 
the children back, but the witches went on. 

The witches of Sweden appear to have been less noxious than 
those of most other countries, for, whatever they acknowledged 
themselves, there seems to have been no evidence of mischief 
done by them. They confessed that they were obliged to prom- 
ise Satan that they would do all kind of mischief, and that the 
devil taught them to milk, which was after this manner. They 
used to slick a knife in the wall, and hang a kind of label on it, 
which they drew and stroked ; and as long as this lasted, the 
persons they had power over were miserably plagued, and the 
beasts were milked that way, till sometimes they died of it. A 
woman confessed that the devil gave her a wooden knife, where- 
with, going into houses, she had power to kill anything she 
touched with it ; yet there were few that would confess that they 
had hurt any man or woman. Being asked whether they had 
murdered any children, they confessed that they had indeed tor- 
mented many, but did not know whether any of them died of 
these plagues, although they said that the devil had showed them 
several places where he had the power to do mischief. The 



370 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

minister of Elfdale declared, that one night these witches were, 
to his thinking, on the crown of his head, and that tiience he had 
a long-continued paiu of the head. And upon this one of the 
witches confessed tRal the devil had sent her to torment that min- 
ister, and that she was ordered to use a nail, and strike it into 
his head ; but his skull was so hard that the nail would not pen- 
etrate it, and merely produced that headache. The hard-headed 
minister said further, that one night he felt a pain as if he were 
torn with an instrument used for combing flax, and when he 
awoke he heard somebody scratching and scraping at the win- 
dow, but could see nobody ; and one of the witches confessed, 
that she was the person that had thus disturbed him. The min- 
ister of Mohra declared also, that one night one of these witches 
came into his house, and did so violently take him by the throat, 
that he thought he should have been choked, and awaking, he 
saw the person that did it, but could not know her ; and that for 
some weeks he was not able to speak, or perform divine service. 

An old woman of Elfdale confessed, that the devil had helped 
her to make a nail, which she struck into a boy's knee, of which 
stroke the boy remained lame a long time. And she added, that 
before she was burned or executed by the hand of justice, the boy 
would recover. 

Another circumstance confessed by these witches was, that 
the devil gave them a beast, about the shape and bigness of a 
cat, which they called a carrier, and a bird as big as a raven, but 
white ; and these they could send anywhere, and wherever they 
came they took away all sorts of victuals, such as butter, cheese, 
milk, bacon, and all sorts of seeds, and carried them to the witch. 
What the bird brought they kept for themselves, but what the 
carrier brought, they took to Blockula, where the archfiend gave 
them as much of it as he thought good. The carriers, they said, 
filled themselves so full oftentimes, that they were forced to 
disgorge it by the way, and what they thus rendered fell to the 
ground, and is found in several gardens where coleworls grow, 
and far from the houses of the witches. It was of a yellow color 
like gold, and was called witches' butter. 

" The lords commissioners," says the report, " were indeed 
very earnest, and took great pains to persuade them to show some 
of their tricks, but to no purpose ; for they did all unanimously 
declare, that since they had confessed all, they found that all 
their witchcraft was gone ; and the devil at this time appeared 
very terrible, with claws on his hands and feet, with horns on 
his head, and a long tail behind, and showed them a pit burning, 



THE END OF THE INQUISY. 371 

with a hand out ; but the devil did thrust the person down ao-ain 
with an iron fork, and suggested to the witches that if they con- 
tinued in their confession, he would deal with them in the same 
manner." 

Such are the details, as far as they can now be obtained, of 
this extraordinaiy delusion, the only one of a similar kind that 
Ave know to have occurred in the northern part of Europe du- 
ring the " age of witchcraft." In other countries we can gen- 
erally trace some particular cause which gave rise to great 
persecutions of this kind, but here, as the story is told, we see 
none, for it is hardly likely that such a strange series of accusa- 
tions should have been the mere involuntary creation of a party 
of little children. Suspicion is excited by the peculiar part which 
the two clergymen of Elfdale and Mohra acted in it, that they 
were not altogether strangers to the fabrication. They seem to 
have been weak superstitious men, and perhaps they had been read- 
ing the witchcraft books of the south till they imagined the country 
round them to be overrun with these noxious beings. The pro- 
ceedings at Mohra caused so much alarm throughout Sweden, 
that prayers were ordered in all the churches for the delivery 
from the snares of Satan, who was believed to have been let loose 
in that kingdom. On a sudden a new edict of the king put a stop 
to the whole process, and the matter was brought to a close rather 
mysteriously. It is said that the witch prosecution was increas- 
ing so much in intensity, that accusations began to be made 
against people of higher class in society, and then a complaint 
was made to the king, and they were stopped. Perhaps the two 
clergymen themselves became alarmed, but one thing seems cer- 
tain, that the moment the commission was revoked, and the per- 
secution ceased, no more witches were heard of. It Avas thus 
in most countries ; as long as the poor alone were the victims, 
their sufferings excited little commiseration, but the moment the 
persecution began to reach the rich, it excited their alarm, and 
means were found to put a stop to it, except Avhen it had some 
ulterior object which it was the interest of those in power to 
pursue. 



372 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

SIR MATTHEW HALE AND CHIEF- JUSTICE HOLT. 

On the tenth of March, 1664, there was a remarkable trial of 
witches at Bury St. Edmonds, in Suffolk, the scene of the la- 
bors of Matthew Hopkins nearly twenty years before. The 
victims were two poor widows of Lowestoff, who appear to have 
obtained a living by performing a number of menial offices for 
their neighbors. One of the chief witnesses was a woman of 
the same town, named Dorothy Durent, who deposed that, about 
five or six years before, she had employed Amy Duny, one of 
the prisoners, to nurse her infant child while she went out of 
the house about her affairs, and that on her return she quarrelled 
with her for having acted contrary to her directions, upon which 
Amy Duny went away in anger, uttering " many high expres- 
sions and threatening speeches." The same night her child, 
was seized with strange and dangerous fits. " And the said ex- 
aminant further said, that she being exceedingly troubled at her 
child's distemper, did go to a certain person named Doctor Job 
Jacob, who lived at Yarmouth, who had the reputation in the 
country to help children that were bewitched ; who advised her 
to hang up the child's blanket in the chimney-corner all day, 
and at night, when she put the child to bed, to put it into the 
said blanket ; and if she found anything in it she should not be 
afraid, but to throw it into the fire. And this deponent did ac- 
cording to his direction, and at night, when she took down the 
blanket with an intent to put her child therein, there fell out of 
the same a great toad, which ran up and down the hearth, and 
she having a young youth only with her in the house, desired 
him to catch the toad and throw it into the fire, which the youth 
did accordingly, and held it there with the tongs ; and as soon 
as it was in the fire, it made a great and horrible noise, and after 
a space there was a flashing in the fire like gunpowder, making 
a noise like the discharge of a pistol, and thereupon the toad 
was no more seen nor heard. It was asked by the court, if that 
after the noise and flashing there was not the substance of the 
toad to be seen to consume in the fire ; and it was answered by 
the said Dorothy Durent, that after the flashing and noise, there 



THE WITCHES OF LOWESTOFF. 373 

was no more seen than if there had been none there. The next 
day there came a young woman, a kinswoman of the said Amy, 
and a neighbor of this deponent, and tokl this deponent that her 
aunt (meaning the said Amy) was in a most lamentable condi- 
tion, having her face all scorched with fire, and that she was 
sitting alone in her house, in her smock, without any fire. And 
thereupon this deponent went into the house of the said Amy 
Duny to see her, and found her in the same condition as was 
related to her, for her face, her legs, and thighs, which this de- 
ponent saw, seemed very much scorched and burnt with fire, at 
which this deponent seemed much to wonder, and asked the 
said Amy how she came into that sad condition ; and the said 
Amy replied that she might thank her for it, for that she, this 
deponent, was the cause thereof, but that she should live to see 
some of her children dead, and she upon crutches. And this 
deponent further saith, that after the burning of the said toad her 
child recovered, and was well again, and was living at the time 
of the assizes." 

Subsequent to these new threats, another child of Dorothy 
Durent was taken ill and died, and she herself was seized with a 
lameness in her legs, in consequence of which she had remained 
a cripple ever since. 

The next offence laid to the charge of Amy Duny was the be- 
witching of the children of Samuel Pacy, a merchant of Lowes- 
tofl", who " carried himself with much soberness during the 
trial." This man deposed " that his younger daughter, Debo- 
rah, npon Thursday the tenth of October last, was suddenly 
taken with a lameness in her legs, so that she could not stand, 
neither had she any strength in her limbs to support her, and so 
she continued until the seventeenth day of the same month, which 
day being fair and simshiny, the child desired to be carried on 
the east part of the house, to be set upon the bank which look- 
eth upon the sea; and while she was sitting there, Amy Duny 
came to this deponent's to buy some herrings, but being denied, 
she went away discontented, and presently returned again, and 
was denied, and likewise the third time, and was denied as at 
first ; and at her last going aw^ay, she went away grumbling, but 
what she said was not perfectly understood. But at the very 
same instant of time the said child was taken with most violent 
fits, feeling most extreme pain in her stomach, like the pricking 
of pins, and shrieking out in a most dreadful manner, like unto 
a whelp, and not like unto a sensible creature. And in this ex- 
tremity the child continued, to the great grief of the parents, un- 

32 



374 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

til the thirtieth of the same month. Curing this time this de- 
ponent sent for one Dr. Feavor, a doclor of physic, to take his 
advice concerning his child's distemper. The doctor being 
come, he saw the child in those fits, but could not conjecture 
(as he then told this deponent, and afterward he affirmed in open 
court at this trial) what might be the cause of the child's atHic- 
tion. And this deponent further saith, that by reason of the cir- 
cumstances aforesaid, and in regard Amy Duny is a woman of 
an ill fame, and commonly reported to be a witch and a sorcer- 
ess, and for that the said child in her fits would cry out of Amy 
Duny as the cause of her malady, and that she did affright her 
with apparitions of her person (as the child in the interval of 
her fits related), he, this deponent, did suspect the said Amy 
Duny for a witch, and charged her with the injury and wrong- 
to his child, and caused her to be set in the stocks on the twen- 
ty-eighth of the same October ; and during the time of her con- 
tinuance there, one Alice Letteridge and Jane Buxton demanded 
of her (as they also affirmed in court upon their oaths) what 
should be the reason of Mr. Pacy's child's distemper, telling her 
that she was suspected to be the cause thereof. She replied, 
' xMr. Pacy keeps a great stir about his child, but let him stay 
until he hath done as much by his children as I have done by 
mine.' And being further examined what she had done to her 
children, she answered that she had been fain to open her child's 
mouth with a tap to give it victuals. And the said deponent 
further deposeth, that within two days after speaking of the said 
words, being the thirtieth of October, his eldest daughter Eliza- 
beth fell into extreme fits, inasmuch that they could not open 
her mouth to give her broth to preserve her life without the help 
of a tap, which they were enforced to use ; and the younger 
child was in like manner afflicted, so that they used the same 
also for her relief." 

The children were now continually visited with fits, similar 
to other supposed sufferers from witchcraft, including the vom- 
iting of crooked pins, nails, &c., aud the spasmodic trances, in 
the latter of which they were in the habit of crying out against 
various women of ill-repute in the town, who, they said, were 
present tormenting them, but more especially against Amy Duny 
and the other prisoner, whose name was Rose Cullender. The 
children declared that these two women appeared to them some- 
times in the act of spinning, and at other times in a variety of 
postures, threatening and mocking them. A friend of the family 
appeared in court as an independent witness, and deposed, that 



ROSE CULLENDER. 375 

in her presence " the children would in their fits cry out. against 
Rose Cullender and Amy Duny, afnrming that they saw them ; 
and they threatened to torment them ten times more if they com- 
plained of thera. At some times the children (only) would see 
things run up and down the house in the appearance of mice ; 
and one of them suddenly snapped one with the tongs, and threw 
it into the fire, and it screeched out like a bat. At another 
time, the younger child being out of her fits, went out of doors 
to take a little fresh air, and presently a little thing like a bee 
flew upon her face, and would have gone into her mouth, where- 
upon the child ran in all haste to the door to get into the house 
again, shrieking out in a most terrible manner; whereupon this 
deponent made haste to come to her, but before she could get to 
her, the child fell into her swooning fit, and at last, with much 
pain and straining herself, she vomited up a twopenny nail with 
a broad head ; and after that the child had raised up the nail she 
came to her understanding, and being demanded by this depo- 
nent how she came by this nail, she answered that the bee 
brought this nail and forced it into her mouth. And at other 
times the elder child declared unto this deponent that during the 
time of her fits, she saw flies come unto her, and bring with 
them in their mouths crooked pins ; and after the child had thus 
declared the same, she fell again into violent fits, and afterward 
raised several pins. At another time the said elder child de- 
clared unto this deponent, and sitting by the fire suddenly started 
up and said she saw a mouse, and she crept under the table 
looking after it, and at length she put something in her apron, 
saying she had caught it ; and immediately she ran to the fire 
and threw it in, and there did appear upon it to this deponent, 
like the flashing of gunpowder, though she confessed she saw 
nothing in the child's hands." 

Another person bewitched was a servant-girl named Susan 
Chandler, whose mother, besides deposing to the discovery of 
Satan's marks on the body of one of the witches, said, " that her 
said daughter being of the age of eighteen years, was then in 
service in the said town, aud rising up early the next morning 
to wash, this Rose Cullender appeared to her, and took her by 
the hand, whereat she was much affrighted, and went forthwith 
to her mother (being in the same town), and acquainted her with 
what she had seen ; but being extremely terrified, she fell ex- 
treme sick, much grieved at her stomach, and that night, after 
being in bed with another young woman, she suddenly shrieked 
out, and fell into such extreme fits as if she were distracted, cry- 



376 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

ing against Rose Cullender, saying she would come to bed to 
her. She continued in this manner beating and wearing herself, 
insomuch that this deponent was glad to get help to attend her. 
In her intervals she would declare that sometimes she saw Rose 
Cullender alone, at another time with a great dog with her ; she 
also vomited up divers crooked pins ; and sometimes she was 
stricken with blindness, and at another time she was dumb, and 
so she appeared to be in court when the trial of the prisoners 
was, for she was not able to speak her knowledge ; but being 
brought into court at the trial, she suddenly fell into her fits, and 
being carried out of the court again, within the space of half an 
hour she came to herself and recovered her speech, and there- 
upon was immediately brought into the court, and asked by the 
court whether she was in condition to take an oath, and to give 
evidence. She said she could. But when she was sworn, and 
asked what she could say against either of the prisoners, before 
she could make any answer she fell into her fits, shrieking out in 
a miserable manner, crying, ' Burn her, burn her !' which was 
all the words she could speak." 

Such was the evidence against the two miserable women 
dragged before the court as prisoners ; and the barrister who ad- 
vocated their cause earnestly pleaded its insufficiency as the 
mere effect of the imaginations of the persons aggrieved, which 
was supported by no direct and substantial evidence fixing the 
crime on the two persons accused, even supposing that the accu- 
sers had really been bewitched. The celebrated Sir Thomas 
Brown was next brought forward in court, and on being asked 
what he thought of the case, declared that "he was clearly of 
opinion that the persons were bewitched," with some further re- 
marks, which appear strange as coming from the mouth of the 
great exposer of " vulgar errors." 

Doubts still existed among some of those who were present in 
court, and they attempted to dispel these by a practical experi- 
ment. " At first, during the time of the trial, there were some 
experiments made with the persons afllicted, by bringing the per- 
sons to touch them ; and it was observed, that when they were 
in the midst of their fits, to all men's apprehension wholly de- 
prived of all sense and understanding, closing their fists in such 
a manner as that the strongest man in the court could not force 
them open, yet by the least touch of one of those supposed witch- 
es. Rose Cullender by name, they would suddenly shriek out, 
opening their hands, which accident would not happen by the 
touch of any other person. And lest they might privately see 



PRACTICAL EXPERIMENTS. 377 

when tliey were touched by the said Rose Cullender, they were 
blinded with their own aprons, and the touching took the same 
effect as before. There was an ingenious person that objected 
there might be a great fallacy in this experiment, and there ought 
not to be any stress put upon this to convict the parties, for the 
children might counterfeit this their distemper, and perceiving 
what was done to them, they might in such manner suddenly 
alter the motion and gesture of their bodies, on purpose to in- 
duce persons to believe that they were not natural, but wrought 
strangely by the touch of the prisoners. Wherefore to avoid 
this scruple, it was privately desired by the judge that the Lord 
Cornwallis, Sir Edmund Bacon, and Mr. Serjeant Keeling, and 
some other gentlemen there in court, would attend one of the dis- 
tempered persons in the farthest part of the hall, while she was 
in her fits, and then send for one of the witches, to try what 
would then happen, which they did accordingly ; and Amy Duny 
was conveyed from the bar and brought to the maid ; they put an 
apron before her eyes, and then one other person touched her 
hand, vi^hich produced the same effect as the touch of the witch 
did in the court. Whereupon the gentlemen returned, openly 
protesting tlip^t they did believe the whole transaction of this busi- 
ness was a mere imposture. This put the court and all persons 
into a stand ; but at length Mr. Pacy did declare, that possibly 
the maid might be deceived by a suspicion that the witch touched 
her when she did not. For he had observed divers times, that 
although they could not speak, but were deprived of the use of 
their tongues and limbs, that their understandings were perfect, 
for that they have related divers things which have been when 
they were in their fits, after they were recovered out of them." 

Disappointed in this experiment, the accusers now brought 
forward some other evidence to prove the character of the pris- 
oners, the principal of which was " one John Soam, of Lowe- 
stoff, yeoman, a sufficient person," who deposed, " That not long 
since, in harvest-time, he had three carts which brought home 
his harvest, and as they were going into the field to load, one of 
the carts wrenched the window of Rose Cullender's house where- 
upon she came out in a great rage and threatened this deponent 
for doing that wrong, and so they passed along into the fields 
and loaded all the three carts, the other two carts returned safe 
home, and back again, twice loaded that day afterward ; but as 
,to this cart which touched Rose Cullender's house, after it was 
loaded it was overturned twice or thrice that day ; and after that 
they had loaded it again this second or third time, as they brought 

32* 



378 SORCE'RY AND MAGIC. 

it through the gate which leadeth out of the field into the town, 
the cart stuck so fast in the gatestead, that they could not possi- 
bly get it through, but were enforced to cut down the post of the 
gate to make the cart pass through, although they could not per- 
ceive that the cart did of either side touch the gate-post. And 
this deponent further said, that after they had got it through the 
gateway, they did with much difficulty get it home into the yard ; 
but for all that they could do, they could not get the cart near 
into the place where they should unload the corn, but were fain 
to unload it at a great distance from the place ; and when they 
began to unload, they found much difficulty therein, it being so 
hard a labor that they were tired that first came ; and when oth- 
ers came to assist them, their noses burst forth a bleeding ; so 
they were fain to desist, and leave it until the next morning, and 
then they unloaded it without any difficulty at all. Robert Sher- 
ringham also deposeth a,gainst Rose Cullender, that about two 
years since, passing along the street with his cart and horses, 
the axle-tree of his cart touched her house, and broke down some 
part of it, at which she was very much displeased, threatening 
him that his horses should suffer for it, and so it happened, for 
all those horses, being four in number, died within a short time 
after ; since that time he hath had great losses by sudden dying 
of his other cattle ; so soon as his sows pigged, the pigs would 
leap and caper, and immediately fall down and die. Also, not 
long after, he was taken with a lameness in his limbs that he 
could neither go nor stand for some days. After all this, he was 
very much vexed with a great number of lice of an extraordina- 
ry bigness, and although he many times shifted himself, yet he 
v/as not anything the better, but would swarm again with them ; 
so that in the conclusion he was forced to burn all his clothes, 
being two suits of apparel, and then was clean from them." 

This was the kind of evidence brought Ibrward in a public 
court of justice in the year 1664, in a trial which has obtained 
especial celebrity from the circumstance that the lord-chief-baron 
who presided over it was the great lawyer. Sir Matthew Hale. 
Yet even he was not exempt from the superstitious feeling of his 
own age, and the cautiously-worded declaration in his charge to 
the jury : "That there were such creatures as witches he made 
no doubt at all ; for first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much ; 
secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against 
such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such 
a crime, and such hath been the judgment of this kingdom, as 
appears by that act of parliament which hath provided punish- 



JUDGMENT OF SIR MATTHEW HALE. 379 

ments proportionable to the quality of the offence" — was consid- 
ered as a public declaration of the judge's opinion in favor of the 
witchcraft prosecutions. The jury retired, passed half an hour 
in deliberation, and returned with a unanimous verdict against 
the prisoners. Sir Matthew Hale interfered no further, but pro- 
ceeded on his circuit ; and the two poor widows of Lowestoff 
w^ere hanged on the following Monday. They persisted to the 
last in asserting their innocence. 

The trial before Sir Matthew Hale had a great influence in 
increasing the number of trials for the crime of sorcery under 
the restoration, although the return of the Stuarts seemed from 
the first to have brought back som.e of the spirit which had been 
spread in England by the first of their race who came to the 
throne. Among other rather ridiculous cases, it will be sufficient 
to instance that of Julian Coxe, a wretched old woman, who, in 
the preceding year, had been convicted and hanged at Taunton 
in Somersetshire, on the evidence of a huntsman, who declared 
that, having given chase to a hare, it was lost in a bush, and that 
on examining the spot, he found on the other side of the bush 
this woman in such an attitude and condition as convinced him 
that he had been hunting a witch who had taken the opportu- 
nity of the shelter afforded by the bush to regain her own shape. 
In the same year that witnessed the trial before Sir Matthew 
Hale, at Bury, a justice of the peace in Somersetshire, named 
Hunt, was ambitious of becoming another witchfinder-general, 
and had already put twelve persons under arrest, when a stop 
was put on his proceedings by the interference of a higher au- 
thority. In 1679, a witch condemned at Ely was saved by a 
reprieve from the king, and her accuser is said to have subse- 
quently avowed his imposture, yet three years afterward the 
city of Exeter witnessed the execution of three witches under 
circumstances well calculated to expose the absurdity of such 
charges. 

Seaport towns appear to have been rather frequently the 
haunts of witches, and the scenes of some of their more extra- 
ordinary operations. At the town of Biddeford, on the coast of 
Devon, dwelt three women, named Temperance Lloyd, Mary 
Trembles, and Susanna Edwards, who seem to have enjoyed a 
character similar to that of Amy Duny and Rose Cullender at 
Lowestoff, and they were arrested and carried prisoners to Ex- 
eter in the summer of 1682. One of the persons who accused 
them was a mariner's wife named Dorcas Coleman, who said 
that in the year 1680 she had been taken with" tormenting pains 



380 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

by prickling in her arms, stomach, and heart, in such a manner 
as she was never taken so before." She applied to one Doctor 
Beare, a professed physician, who told her it was past his skill 
to save her, inasmuch as she was bewitched. We thus see, 
what has indeed occurred often before, how unskilful physi- 
cians, in the attempt to conceal their own ignorance, added to and 
strengthened the prejudices of the vulgar. Dorcas Coleman had 
no suspicion of the person that had bewitched her, until Susan- 
na Edwards was thrown into prison, and then she went to her 
to ask if she were her persecutor, and received an answer in 
the affirmative. Another woman of Biddeford, named Grace 
Thomas, was attacked somewhat in the same manner, and de- 
clared that as soon as Temperance Lloyd was committed to 
prison, she " immediately felt her pricking and sticking pains to 
cease and abate." Upon this one of the friends of Grace Thom- 
as " did demand of the said Temperance Lloyd whether she 
had any wax or clay in the form of a picture whereby she had 
pricked and tormented the said Grace Thomas ; unto which the 
said Temperance made answer, that she had no wax nor clay, 
but confessed that she had only a piece of leather which she 
had pricked nine times." Temperance Lloyd was searched, 
and they found on her body two " teats," which she confessed 
had been sucked by " the black man ;" and one of the searchers, 
who was an acquaintance of the accused, declared that on the 
morning of the preceding Thursday, " she, this informant, did 
see something in the shape of a magpie to come at the chamber 
window where the said Grace Thomas did lodge. Upon which 
this informant did demand of the said Temperance Lloyd 
whether she did know of any bird to come and flutter, at the 
said window ; unto which question the said Temperance did 
then say that it was the black man in the shape of the bird." 
Having obtained thus much of foundation to build upon, the ac- 
count of the black man was soon amplified, and " beimg demand- 
ed of what stature the said black man was," she was prevailed 
upon to describe him as being " about the length of her arm ; 
and that his eyes were very big ; and that he hopped or leaped 
in the way before her." The veiy picture, in fact, of a "puck" 
or hobgoblin. 

It is hardly necessary to enter further into the rather nume- 
rous depositions made on this occasion. A piece of leather was 
found, in which the prosecutors and judges " conceived there 
might be some enchantment ;" a child's doll Avas also produced, 
which it was further imagined might have been pricked with 



THE TRIALS AT EXETER. 381 

pins ; it was deposed that Temperance Lloyd had appeared in 
the form of a red pig to a woman while she was brewing ; and 
upon this evidence, and more of the same description, the three 
women were convicted by the jury, and they were all hanged at 
Exeter. When these wretched women were on the scaffold, 
they were again tormented with questions, and returned such 
answers as might be expected from persons in a condition that 
they hardly knew what they were asked or what they said in 
reply. Among other things. Temperance Lloyd was asked, 
" How did you come in to hurt Mrs. Grace Thomas ? did you 
pass through the keyhole of the door, or was the door open 1 

" Temp. The devil did lead me up-stairs, and the door was 
open ; and this is all the hurt I did. 

" Q. How do you know it was the devil 1 

" Temp. I knew it by his eyes. 

" Q. Had you no discourse or treaty with him ? 

" Temp. No ; he said I should go along with him to destroy 
a woman, and I told him I would not ; he said he would make 
me ; and then the devil beat me about the head. 

" Q. Why had you not called upon God ? 

'• Temp. He would not let me do it. 

" Q. You say you never hurt ships nor boats — did you never 
ride over an arm of the sea on a cow 1 

" Temp. No, no, master, 'twas she" [meaning Susan). 

Another interrogator, equally unfeeling, closed the scene with 
asking the victim if she had never seen the devil but once. 

" Temp. Yes, once before ; I was going for brooms, and he 
came to me and said, ' that poor woman has a great burthen,' 
and would help and ease me of my burthen ; and I said, ' the 
Lord had enabled me to carry it so far, and I hope I shall be 
able to carry it further.' 

" Q. Did the devil never promise you anything ? 

" Temp. No, never. 

" Q. Then you have served a very bad master, who gave 5''ou 
nothing. Well, consider you are just departing from this world ; 
do you believe there is a God 1 

" Temp. Yes. 

" Q. Do you believe in Jesus Christ? 

" Temp. Yes ; and I pray Jesus Christ to pardon all my sins. 
Ajid so was executed." 

These three women are said to have been the last persons 
who were executed in England for the crime of witchcraft. A 
great change in opinion on this subject was now taking place 



382 ^ SOKCERY AND MAGIC. 

in the minds of reflecting people. The vice of the court of 
Charles II. was skepticism rather than credulity, and although 
bigotry and superstition again appeared under the influence of 
his brother, their reign was of short duration. Two books were 
published during this period which certainly had some influence 
in breaking the strength of the popular prejudice on the subject. 
The first of these was a small volume by a gentleman of educa- 
tion named John Wagstafl'e, which appeared in 1669, imder the 
title of " The Question of Witchcraft Debated." In the opening 
of this work Wagstaffe expresses in strong terms his horror at 
the multitudes of human beings who had been during so many 
ages sacrificed to " this idol, Opinion ;" and he protests against 
the " evil and base custom of torturing people to confess them- 
selves witches, and burning them after extorted confessions. 
Surely the blood of men ought not to be so cheap, nor so easily 
to be shed by those who, under the name of God, do gratify ex- 
orbitant passions and selfish ends.; for without question, under 
this side heaven, there is nothing so sacred as the life of man, 
for the preservation whereof all policies and forms of govern- 
ment, all laws and magistrates are most especially ordained." 
Wagstaffe's book was replied to in a tone of flippant self-sulS- 
cien'cy by Meric Casaubon, in a treatise published in the follow- 
ing year under the title, " Of Credulity and Incredulity in 
Things Divine and Spiritual." 

A still greater champion soon afterward stepped into the field 
of controversy thus opened. This was John Webster, a native 
of Lancashire, the same whom we have already seen in his 
youth opposing in vain the imposture of the boy Pendle. Web- 
ster had lived, a careful observer, throughout the whole period 
of the great witchcraft mania in England, and now in his old 
age he published his matured judgment on the subject which had 
so long agitated men's minds, under the title which at once in- 
dicated the view he took of it, of " The Displaying of supposed 
Witchcraft." This stately folio appeared in the year 1677, and 
there can be little doubt of its having made a strong impression 
on the succeeding generation. Webster attacked with all the 
force of argument and wit the superstition to which so many vic- 
• tims had been sacrificed, and he exposed the fallacies by which 
it had been sustained. He made no concessions to public opin- 
ion, like most of those who preceded him on the same side of 
the question, and who were afraid to push too far the reasons on 
which they rested their cause ; but he boldly published the 
opinion that witchcraft was nothing but a vulgar error, and that 



CHIEF-JUSTICE HOLT. 383 

all the instances wliicli had occiirred and which had led to such 
a fearful destruction of human life, were founded only in delib- 
erate imposture, in statements made Tinder fear of torture, in 
mental delusion, or in natural phenomena which were easily 
explained by science and reason without the necessity of calling 
in supernatural causes. 

Books like these were chiefly calculated to influence the edu- 
cated part of society, and we soon perceive their efl^ects in the 
course of justice. After the revolution of 'eighty-eight, there 
seems to have been a strong tendency to renew the persecution 
against witches, but Sir Matthew Hale had been succeeded by a 
judge of no less weight and talent, who was in this respect at least 
more enlightened — the lord-chief-justice Holt. Three women 
were thrown into prison in 1691 for bewitching a person near 
Frome, in Somersetshire, of whom one died before she was 
brought to trial ; but the other two, having Chief- Justice Holt for 
their judge, were acquitted. This case seems to have been the 
first check put upon the courts of law ; and the populace, disap- 
pointed of what they called justice, had recourse, without appeal- 
ing to the law, to the old popular trial of swimming the persons 
suspected, of which there were numerous instances during this 
and the following year in the counties of Essex, Suff"oIk, Cam- 
bridge, and Northampton. Some of the patients died under the 
infliction. The scene of the labors of Matthew Hopkins seems 
to have retained its witch-persecuting celebrity. In 1693, one 
Widow Chambers, of Upaston, in Suffolk, who is described by 
Dr. Hutchinson as " a diligent, industrious, poor woman," died 
in Beccles jail in consequence of the treatment she had expe- 
rienced. She had been walked between two men, according to 
the celebrated plan of the witch-finder Hopkins, and was thus 
drawn to confess a number of absurdities, such as the bewitching 
to death of persons who were then living and in good health. In 
the year following, another poor woman named Mother Munnings, 
of Hartis, in Suffolk, was tried before the lord-chief-justice Holt, 
at Bury St. Edmunds ; many things were deposed concerning 
her, such as spoiling of wort, and hurting cattle, and it Avas sta- 
ted that several persons upon their death-beds had complained 
that she killed them. It was further deposed, that her landlord, 
Thomas Fennel, wishing to force her out of a house she had of 
him, took away the door, and left her without one. Some time 
after, she said to him as he passed by the door, " Go thy way, 
thy nose shall lie upward in the churchyard before Saturday 
next.". On the Monday following, we are assured he sickened, 



334 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

and died on Tuesday, and was buried within the week, accord- 
ing to her word. To confirm this, it was added by another wit- 
ness, that a doctor whom they had consulted about an afflicted 
person, when Mother Munnings was mentioned, said she was a 
dangerous woman, for she could " touch the line of life." In her 
indictment, she was charged with having an imp like a pole-cat ; 
and one witness deposed, that coming from the alehouse about 
nine at night, he looked in at her window, and saw her take out 
of her baslcet two imps, one black the other white. It was also 
deposed, that one Sarah Wager, after a quarrel with this woman, 
was taken dumb and lame, and was in that condition at home at 
the time of the trial. Many other such things were sworn, but 
in consequence of the charge from the judge, the jury brought 
her in not guilty. Dr. Hutchinson, who obtained the notes of this 
trial through Chief- Justice Holt himself, adds on this statement : 
" Upon particular inquiry of several in or near the town, I find 
most are satisfied that it was a very right judgment. She lived 
about two years after, without doing any known harm to anybody, 
and died declaring her innocence. Her landlord was a consump- 
tive spent man, and the words not exactly as they swore them, 
and the whole thing seventeen years before. For by a certificate 
from the register, I find he was buried June 20, 1667. The 
white imp is believed to have been a lock of wool, taken out of her 
basket to spin, and its shadow it is supposed was the black one." 
The same year, a woman of the name of Margaret Elmore 
was tried at Ipswich before the lord-chief-justice Holt. She was 
accused of having bewitched one Mrs. Rudge of that town, who 
was three years in a languishing condition, because, as it was 
alleged, Mr. Rudge, the husband of the afflicted person, had re- 
fused to let her a house. Some witnesses said that Mrs. Rudge 
was better upon the confinement of the woman, and worse again 
when her chains were off". Other witnesses gave an account, 
that her grandmother and her aunt had formerly been hanged for 
witches, and that her grandmother had said she had eight or nine 
imps, and that she had given two or three imps a piece to her 
children. This grave accusation was considered to be fully con- 
firmed, when a midwife who had searched Margaret Elmore's 
grandmother, who had been hanged, said, this woman had plain- 
er marks than she. Others deposed to their being covered with 
lice after quarrels with her. But notwithstanding these deposi- 
tions, the jury brought her in not guilty, " and," says Dr. Hutch- 
inson, " though I have made particular inquiry, I do not hear of 
any ill consequence." 



SATAN IN NEV/ ENGLAND. " 385 

In 1695, Mary Guy was tried before the lord-chief-justice 
Holt, at Launceston, in Cornwall, for supposed witchcraft upon a 
girl named Philadelphia Row. It was deposed that the appear- 
ance of the said Mary Guy was often seen by the girl, and that 
she vomited pins, straws, and feathers ; but notwithstanding such 
depositions, the prisoner was acquitted. One Elizabeth Horner 
was tried before the same intelligent judge at Exeter, in 1696 
for bewitching three children of William Bovet, one of whom 
was dead. It was deposed, that another had her legs twisted, 
and yet from her hands and knees she would spring five feet 
high. The children vomited pins, and were bitten (if°the depo- 
sitions were true), and pricked, and pinched, the marks appear- 
ing ; the children said, Bess Horner's head would come off from 
her body, and go into their bellies ; the mother of the children 
deposed, that one of them walked up a smooth plastered wall, to 
the height of nine feet, her head standing off from it ; this, she 
said, she did five or six times, and laughed and said, Bess Horner 
held her up. This poor woman had something like a nipple on 
her shoulder, which the children said was sucked by a toad. 
Many other strange things were asserted by different witnesses ; 
but the jury brought her m not guilty, " and no inconvenience 
hath followed from her acquittal." 



CHAPTER XXXL 

THE DOIXGS OF SATAN IN NEW ENGLAND. 

. As Satan found that, beaten by the force of public opinion, he 
was losing his hold on the mother-country, he seemed resolved 
to fix a firmer grasp upon her distant colonies, and the new world 
presented at this moment a scene v.-hich exemplifies the horrors 
and the absurdities of the witchcraft-persecutions more than any- 
thing that had occurred in the old world. 

The colony of Massachusetts bay, in New England, was essen- 
tially a religious — a puritanical settlement. One of the congrega- 
tions of the English presbyterians who sought refuge in Holland 
from the intolerance of James I., finding their position there un- 
easy, came to the resolution of establishing themselves in the 
wilds of North jVmerica, where they could worship the Almighty 
after their owa convictions, unseen and untroubled by those who 

S3 



386 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

differed from them. They made arrangements for settling in the. 
English colony of Virginia, and set sail fur America in 1618, but 
carried out of their course by stress of weather and other causes, 
they arrived on a coast more to the north, on which no settle- 
ment had hitherto been made. In the last days of the year they 
laid the foundations of the first town in New England, to which 
they gave the name of Plymouth. They formed an alliance with 
an Indian chief by whom this territory had been previously occu- 
pied, a" great part of whose tribe had been carried off by the 
small-pox, and who was glad of their support against the hostile 
tribes of Narragansets. Several other settlements were subse- 
quently attempted on this coast, but the settlers were ill-fitted for 
amalgamating with the puritans of New Plymouth, or to struggle 
with the difficulties they had encountered, and they therefore 
soon abandoned their enterprise. Under Charles I., the religious 
emigration from England was greatly increased, and the old set- 
tlers on these distant shores were soon joined by multitudes of 
friends who shared in their principles and feelings. Some of 
these founded, in 1628, the town of Salem. Soon afterward 
Boston was founded, w^hich became at once the principal town 
of Massachusetts "bay. From the peculiar constitution of this 
singular colony, it became as intolerant as it was religious, and 
its earlier history presents us with frequent instances of persecu- 
tion for the sake of conscientious convictions. Religious discus- 
sions here took the place of political disputes, and disturbed from 
time to time the peace of the infant colony. A school having 
been founded at a small town called Newtown, it was erected in- 
to a university in 1638, and named Plarvard college, from a pious 
ininister who left a legacy for its endowment, and the name of 
Newtown was changed to that of Cambridge, in memory of the 
celebrated scholastic establishment in the mother-country. One 
of the most distinguished of the New England ministers, Eliott, 
labored to convert the Indians, and to establish more intimate and 
friendly relations with them, with great success, and his example 
having been followed by many others, there were, in 1687, no less 
than four-and-twenty Indians who were preachers of the gospel 
among their countrymen. During the period of the protectorate, the 
intolerant spirit of the colony was shown in the persecution of sev- 
eral anabaptists who had settled there. This was followed by a 
much more severe persecution of the quakers. The reign of 
Charles II., was a period of trouble for the colonists. Many per- 
ished in a fierce war with the Indians, although the latter were 
entirely defeated and reduced. This was followed by vexatious 



SORCERY IN NEW ENGLAND. 387 

proceedings on tlie part of the government of the mother-coun- 
try, which ended in the seizure of their charter. In 1689, after 
the accession of the prince of Orange to the English throne, the 
charter was restored, or rather a new one was given to them, and 
Sir William Phipps was appointed their governor. It was during 
the forfeiture of the charter that the following events commenced. 

It is not to be wondered at if the planters of New England 
carried with them all the superstitious feelings which had been 
shown by their brethren in England, It was the general belief 
of those times that the gods or idols worshipped by the heathens 
— and especially by the Indians — were demons, and that they 
were constantly waging war with the Christian professors through 
the instrumentality of sorcery. Some of the old doctors in de- 
monology were of opinion that the devil was unable to work evil 
against the persons or property of Chrislians unless he could ob- 
tain Christians to be his willing agents, and in this way they ac- 
counted for his eagerness to make and multiply witches. It was 
natural enough for men placed like the colonists of New Eng- 
land, and with their feelings, to believe that the demon who had 
previously held undisturbed possession of this district should be 
angered at the plantation of the gospel in it, and that he should be 
hostile to the puritanical settlers ; but they were a select body — 
select in faith, and select in personal attachment — and they had 
no enemies among themselves who were likely to sell themselves 
to Satan and to become his instruments of persecution. It is not 
surprising, therefore, if during the first half century after the 
foundation of the colony the idea of suspecting any one of witch- 
craft hardly occurred to their minds. It was only when there 
were more people of a miscellaneous character in the settlement, 
and after the fiend had failed in destroying it by an insurrection 
of the Indians, that he formed the more insidious design of over- 
throwing it by a confederation of witches. 

Four persons had indeed been charged with witchcraft in 
1645, and had, been executed ; but this single case made no 
great sensation, and the crime was not heard of again for many 
years. At length, in the year 1688, a case occurred at Boston, 
which struck the colonists with no little dismay. A niLJson of 
that town, named John Goodwin, who had six children, was in 
the habit of employing as a washerwoman one of his neighbors 
named Glover, an Irishwoman and a p?)pist, neither of ihem any 
great recommendation in the state of New England. About the 
midsummer of the year last-mentioned, some linen having beer 
missed, Goodwin's wife accused the woman of theft, on whicH 



3S8 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

she became angry and abusive, and used cross language to one 
of the children, a little girl. Immediately afterward, this girl 
was seized with fits and strange afflictions, which soon commu- 
nicated themselves to three of her sisters. The Irishwoman fell 
under suspicion, and was arrested, and in her examination she 
answered so incoherently, and with such a strange mixture of 
Irish and broken English, that she was soon brought in guilty, 
and the solemnity of the examination and execution made a deep 
impression on the minds of the people of Boston. 

There were in that town two ministers (father and son), who, 
for many reasons, held a distinguished place among the clergy 
of New England, and their opinions were looked up to with the 
utmost respect. These were Increase and Cotton Mather, the 
first principal, and the second a fellow of Harvard college. 
These men seem to have studied deeply the doctrines on the 
subject of witchcraft which had so long been held in Europe, 
and to have been fully convinced of their truth. Cotton Mather 
was called in to witness the afflictions with which Goodwin's 
children were visited, and not content with what he saw there, 
he took the girl whose visitations seemed most extraordinary to 
his own home, that he might examine her more leisurely, and he 
has left us a printed account of his observations. It appears 
l;hat some of the stories of European v/itchcraft had been im- 
pressed on her mind, for when in her fits she believed that the 
witches came for her with a horse on v/hich she rode to their 
meetings. Sometimes, in the presence of a number of persons, 
she would suddenly fall into a sort of trance, and then she would 
jump into a chair, and placing herself in a riding posture, move 
as if she were successively ambling, trotting, and gallopping. 
At the same time she would talk with invisible company, that 
seemed to go with her, and she would listen to their answers. 
After continuing in this way two or three minutes, she seemed 
to think herself at a meeting of the witches, a great distance 
from the house where she was sitting ; then she would return 
again on her imaginary horse, and come to herself again ; and 
on one occasion she told Cotton Mather of three persons she 
had seen at the meeting. Dr. Mather's simplicity, to say the 
least, was shown by the sort of experiments he made on this 
fantastical patient. When she was in her fits, and therefore 
under the influence of Satan, she read or listened to bad books 
with pleasure, but good books threvv her into convulsions. He 
tried her with the Bible, the assembly's catechism, his grand- 
idther Cotton Mather's " Milk for Babes," and his father In- 



COTTON MATHER. 389 

crease's " Remarkable Providences," with a treatise written to 
prove the reality of witchcraft, and the existence of witches. 
These good books, Cotton Mather tells us, " were mortal to 
her," they threw her into trances and convulsions. Next he 
tried her with books of a different character, such as quakers' 
books (the quakers were looked upon with a very evil eye in 
New England), popish books, the Cambridge and Oxford Jests, 
a prayer-book (against which the puritans alwaj^s professed the 
greatest hostility), and a book written to prove that there were 
no witches. These the devil let her read as long as slie liked, 
and he showed particular respect to the prayer-book, even al- 
lowing her to read the passages of scripture in it, although he 
threw her into the most dreadful sufferings if she attempted to' 
read the same texts in the Bible. 

Dr. Cotton Mather gave the world a full account of this case 
in a little book entitled, " Late Memorable Providences relating 
to Witchcraft and Possession," in which he also collected to- 
gether a few other cases of witchcraft in New England, which 
show that there was already a strong excitement abroad on the 
subject. This he increased by repeating to the colonists the de- 
tails of the trial before Matthew Hale and other cases which 
had occurred in England ; and further, by dispersing among 
them in the following year, with a warm recommendation of its 
merits, Baxter's '• Certainty of the World of Spirits," a work 
well calculated to spread the terror of witchcraft. 

There can be little doubt that Cotton Mather's zeal in spread- 
ing abroad the doctrines of the old world on this subject contrib- 
uted to the catastrophe which followed in the new. 

A Mr. Paris had been for some years minister of Salem vil- 
lage. He appears to have been on indifferent terms with his 
parishioners, on account of some disputes relating to the house 
and land he occupied as their minister, of which he had obtained 
a gift in fee-simple. Toward the end of February of 1692, some 
young persons in his fainily, and some others of their neighbors, 
began to act after a strange manner, creeping into holes and un- 
der chairs and stools, using antic gestures, uttering ridiculous 
speeches, and falling into fits. The physicians were consulted, 
but they were unable to discover the nature of the disorder, or 
to effect a cure, and they declared their belief that they were 
bewitched. Mr. Paris had an Jndian man and woman — the lat- 
ter named Tituba — as servants in his house, and they, with Mr. 
Paris's consent, made an enchanted cake, according to the cus- 
tom of their tribes, and this being given to a dog belonging to 

33* 



390 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

the family, was to enable the persons afflicted to declare who 
had bewitched ihem. The result was that they accused the two 
Indians, and the woman confessed herself guilty, and was thrown 
into prison ; she was subsequently sold to pay the prison fees. 
Several private fasts were now held in the house of Mr. Paris, 
and a public fast was directed throughout the colony, to avert 
God's wrath. 

Being visited and noticed, the children and others afflicted 
proceeded to other denunciations, and other persons exhibited 
similar fits and contortions. At first they ventured only on ac- 
cusing poor women, who were of ill-repute in the place, and 
they talked of a black man who urged them to sign a book, 
which they said was red, very thick, and about a cubit long. 
They were gradually encouraged to accuse persons of a more 
respectable position in life, and among the first of these were 
Goodwife Cory and Goodwife Nurse, members of the churches 
at Salem village and Salem town. On the 21st of March Good- 
wife Cory was subjected to a solemn examination in the meet- 
ing-house of the village. Ten afflicted persons accused her of 
tormenting them. Thej^ said that in their fits they saw her like- 
ness coming with a book for them to sign. She earnestly as- 
serted her innocence, and represented that they were poor dis- 
tracted creatures, who knew not what thej^ were saying. Upon 
this they declared, that " the black man whispered to her in her 
ear now (while she was upon examinatioi\), and that she had a 
yellow bird, that did use .to suck between her fingers, and that 
the said bird did suck now in the assembly.* Order being given 
to look in that place to see if there were any sign, the girl that 
pretended to see it said that it was too late now, for she had re- 
moved a pin, and put it on her head. It was upon search found 
that a pin was there sticking upright. When the accused had 
any motion of her body, hands, or mouth, the accusers would cry 
out ; as when she bit her lip, they would cry out of being bitten ; 
if she grasped one hand with the other, they would cry out of 
being pinched by her, and would produce marks ; so of the other 
motions of her body, as complaining of being pressed, when she 
leaned to the seat next her ; if she stirred her feet, they would 

* These yellow birds — perhaps canaries — form a peculiar feature of witchcraft in 
New Eiigknd. '" In sei'mmi tiine. when Goorlwife C was present in the meeting- 
house, Abigail WilliRms rfiU (1 oiii, 'Look where Goofl w ife C. sits on tlie beam 
sui'kling her yellow binl betwixt lier fiiigers!' Anne Pitman, another girl afflict- 
ed, said, ' Tliere was a yellow bird sat on my hat as it hnng on tlie pin in the pul- 
pit ;' but those that -were by restrained her from speaking loud about it." — In- 
crease Mather's "Further Account of the New England Witches/' p. 2. 



SALEM WITCHES. 391 

stamp and cry out of pain there. After the hearing, the said 
Cory was committed to Salem prison, and then their crying out 
of her abated." 

On the 24th of March, Goodvvife Nurse was suddenly exam- 
ined before the ministers and magistrates in the meetinghouse, 
Avith the same resuh. A child between four and five years old 
was now also committed. The accusers said that this child 
came invisibly, and bit them, and they would show the marks 
of small teeth on their arras to corroborate the statement ; and 
"when the child cast its eye upon them, they immediatel}^ cried 
out that they were in torment. 

The number of accusers and accused now incre-ased fast, and 
some of the latter, as the only means of saving themselves, made 
confessions, and accused others. They all spoke of a black man, 
and some described him as resembling an Indian, a circum- 
stance we can easily understand. We are told by one of the 
historians of these events of a converted Indian, who was a zeal- 
ous preacher of the gospel among his countrymen ; " being a lit- 
tle before he died at worL in the wood making of tar, there ap- 
peared unto him a black man, of a terrible aspect and more than 
human dimensions, threatening bitterly to kill him, if he would 
not promise to leave oft preaching to his countrymen." This is 
said to have occurred just before the events I am now relating ; 
the black man of the confessions was of ordinary stature, but he 
made no secret of his design to destroy the Christian settlement, 
and he held meetings of his converts — those who had signed his 
book — where they had mock ceremonies and participated in a 
mock sacrament. One of the accused, who saved himself by 
confessing, told how the devil appeared " in the shape of a black 
man, in the evening, to set my name to his book, as I have 
ov/ned to my shame ; he told me that I should not want, so do- 
ing. At Salem village, there being, a little off the meeting- 
house, about a hundred tine blades, some with rapiers by their 
sides, .... and the trumpet sounded, and bread and wine, 
which they called the sacrament ; but I had none, being carried 
over all on a stick, and never was present at any other meeting." 
- — " The design was to destroy Salem village, and to begin at 
the minister's house, and to destroy the churches of God, and to 
set up Satan's kingdom, and then all will be well." 

The ministers and magistrates went on with their fastings and 
examinings, as the number of persons accused increased, until, 
on the 11th of April, there was a grand public hearing at Salem 
before six magistrates and several ministers. One Goodwife 



392 SOECERY AND MAGIC. 

Procter was among the persons accused on this occasion. Her 
husband attended to assist and advise her, and when he took her 
part, the accusers " cried out on him," and both were accordingly 
committed. 

On the 14th of May, 1692, Sir William Phipps arrived, bring- 
ing with him the new charter of the colony. Instead of being 
the harbinger of peace by importing the liberal principles which 
were now gaining ground in England, the new governor either 
shared in the prejudices of the colonists, or wished to gain pop- 
ularity among them by appearing to do so, and he ordered all the 
prisoners who were charged with witchcraft to be thrown into 
chains. Upon this the afflicted persons are said to have been in 
general relieved from their tortures. The accusations were now 
multiplied, and people of the greatest respectability in society 
became subject to the denunciations of the afflicted. On the 
24th of May, a Mrs. Gary, of Gharlestown, having been accused 
by some of the girls and an Indian, was arrested and brought 
before the ministers and magistrates for examination. Her 
husband went with her to support her in her trials, and we have 
his account of the manner in which the examination was carried 
on. " Being brought before the justices," he says, " her chief 
accusers were two girls. My wife declared to the justices that 
she never had any knowledge of them before that day. She 
was forced to stand with her arras stretched out. . I did request 
that I might hold one of her hands, but it was denied me. Then 
she desired me to wipe the tOLWs from her eyes and the sweat 
from her face, v.diich I did. Then she desired she might lean 
herself on me, saying she should faint. Justice Halhorn replied, 
she had strength enough to torment those persons, and she should 
have strength enough to stand. I speaking something against 
their cruel proceedings, they commanded me to be silent, or else 
I should be turned out of the room. The Indian before men- 
tioned was also brought in to be one of her accusers ; being 
come in, he now (when before the justices) fell down and tum- 
bled about like a hog, but said nothing. The justice asked the 
girls, who afflicted the Indian. They answered, ' she' (meaning 
my wife), and now lay upon him ; the justices ordered her to 
touch him, in order to his cure, but her head must be turned an- 
other way, lest instead of curing she should make him worse by 
her looking on him, her hand being guided to take hold of his ; 
but the Indian took hold on her hand, and pulled her down on the 
floor, in a barbarous manner; then his hand was taken off, and 
her hand put on his, and the cure was quickly wrought." 



THE EXECUTIONS COMMENCE. 393 

When this man proceeded to expostulate in favor of his wife, 
he only provoked the court by his interference, and the afPiicted 
were ready to '' cry out" against him. Both, however, succeeded 
in making their escape ; and they proceeded to Rhode Island, 
and thence to New York. The prosecutors now adopted some 
of the modes of trial- which they learned from the printed books 
that had been imported from England, such as making the ac- 
cused say the Lord's Prayer, and searching for teats. One of the 
latter was said to have been found on the person of Goodwife 
Bishop. On the 31st of May, the accusers struck a step higher, 
and " cried out" upon a sea-captain of Boston, named John Aldin, 
who was brought to Salem for examination. He asked his ac- 
cusers, " Why they should think that he should come to that vil- 
lage to afflict those persons that he never knew or saw before ?" 
But he found expostulation in vain, and he was committed to 
prison in Boston. The jailer, however, began to treat his pris- 
oners with less rudeness, and after a long imprisonment, Captain 
Aldin escaped, perhaps with the jailer's connivance. 

On the 2d of June a special commission v/as opened at Salem 
for the trial of the offenders. The depositions were many of 
them of such an extraordinary character, that we can not be sur- 
prised at being told that on the fifteenth of the same month Gov- 
ernor Phipps found it necessary to consult with the ministers of 
Boston, and that he was advised by them to proceed with caution. 
Five days before, Bridget Bishop had been hanged, which was 
the first of this series of executions. 

The actors in this tragedy began, as I have already intimated, 
by accusing persons who were already despised and disliked by 
their neighbors, whose ears therefore were open to any charges 
against them. Bridget Bishop, tbe first woman executed, and 
Susanna Martin, who was condemned about the same time, be- 
longed to this class, and, to judge by the extraordinary deposi- 
tions on their trials, both had been for some time regarded as 
dangerous individuals. One of the " afilicted" stated that "the 
shape" of the prisoner appeared to her frequently, and bit, pricked, 
and otherwise tormented her. Another testi'tied, " that it was 
the shape of this prisoner (Bishop) with another, which one day 
took her from her v.'heel, and carried her to the river side, threat- 
ening there to drown her if she did not sign the bo.ok." It is 
added, " One Deliverance Hobbes, who had confessed her being 
a witch, was now tormented by the spectres for her confession. 
And she now testified, that this Bishop tempted her to sign the 
book agam, and to deny what she had confessed. She affirmed 



394 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

that it was the shnpe of this prisoner which whipped her with 
iron rods to compel her ihereiinto. And she affirmed that this 
Bishop was at a general meeting of the witches, in a field at 
Salem village, and there partook of a diabolical sacrament in 
bread and wine there administered." Several persons stated 
that they had been disturbed in their beds by nocturnal visits of 
the " shape" of Bishop ; and one man complained of her for be- 
witching his sow. 

Other witnesses accused Bridget Bishop of still more extraor- 
dinary pranks, such, for example, as that recounted by one John 
Louder, Avho deposed, " That upon some little controversy with 
Bishop about her fowls going well to bed, he did awake in the 
night by moonlight, and did see clearly the likeness of this wo- 
man grievously oppressing him ; in'which miserable condition she 
held him, unable to help himself, until near day. He told Bishop 
of this ; but she denied it, and threatened him very much. 
Quickly after this, being at home on a Lord's day, with the doors 
shut about him, he saw a black pig approach him ; at which he 
going to kick, it vanished away. Lnmediately after, sitting 
down, he saw a black thing jump in at the window, and come 
and stand before him. The body was like that of a monkey, the 
feet like a cock's, but the face much like that of a man. He 
being so extremely affrighted that he could not speak, this mon- 
ster spoke to him, and said, 'I am a messenger sent unto you, 
for I understand that you are in some trouble of mind, and if you 
will be ruled by me, you shall want for nothing in this world.' 
Whereupon he endeavored to clap his hands upon it; but he 
could feel no substance ; and it jumped out of the window again ; 
but immediately came in by the porch, though the doors were 
shut, and said, 'You had better take my counsel!' He then 
struck at it with a stick, but struck only the groundsel, and broke 
the stick. The arm with which he struck was presently disen- 
abled, and it vanished away. He presently went out at the back 
.door, and spied this Bishop in her orchard going toward her 
house, but he had no power to set one foot forward unto her. 
Whereupon, returning into the house, he was immediatel)'- ac- 
costed by the monster he had seen before ; which goblin was 
now going to fly at him ; whereat he cried out, ' The whole ar- 
mor of God be betvi^een me and you.' So it sprang back, and 
flew over the apple-tree, shaking many apples off the tree in its 
flying over. At its leap it flung dirt with its feet against the 
stomach of the man ; whereupon he v/as then struck dumb, and 
so continued for three days together." 



SUSANNA MARTIN. 395 

As to Susanna Manin, who was also accused of paying visits 
to people through their chamber windows, a man named Bernard 
Peache, deposed in court, " that being in bed, on the Lord's day 
at night, he heard a scrambling at the window, whereat he then 
saw Susanna Martin come in and jump down upon the floor. 
She took hold of this deponent's foot, and drawing his body into 
a heap, she lay upon him near two hours- in all which time he 
could neither speak nor stir. At length, when he could begin to 
move, he laid hold on her hand, and pulling it up to his mouth, 
he bit some of her fingers, as he judged, unto the bone. Where- 
upon she went from the chamber, down stairs, out at the door. 
This deponent thereupon called out to the people of the house, 
to advise them of what had passed ; and he himself did follow 
her. The people saw her not, but there being a bucket at the 
left hand of the door, there was a drop of blood found upon it, 
and several more drops of bk)od upon the snow newly-fallen 
abroad. There was likewise the print of her two feet just v/ith- 
out the threshold, but no more sign of any footing further on. 
At another time this deponent was desired by the prisoner to 
come unto a husking of corn at her house, and she said if he did 
not come it were better that he did. He went not ; but the night 
following Susanna Martin as he judged, and another came 
toward him. One of them said, ' Here he is,' but he having a 
quarter-stafl', made a blow at them. The roof of the barn broke 
his blow, but following them to the window, he made another 
blow at them, and struck them down ; yet they got up and got 
out, and he saw no more of thera. About this time there was a 
rumor about the town that Martin had a broken head, but the de- 
ponent could say nothing to that." Another neighbor, whose 
name was John Kembal, stated that, " Being desirous to furnish 
himself with a dog, he applied himself to buy one of this Mar- 
tin, who had a bitch with whelps in her house. But she not let- 
ting him have his choice, he said he would apply himself then 
at one Blezdel's. Having marked a puppy which he liked at 
Blezdel's, he met George Martin, the husband of the prisoner, 
going by, who asked hini whether he would not have one of his 
wife's puppies, and he answered, no. The same day, one Ed- 
ward Elliot, being at Martin's house, heard George Martin relate 
where this Kembal had been, and what he had said. Whereup- 
on Susanna Martin replied, 'If I live I'll give him puppies 
enough.' Within a few days after this, Kembal coming out of 
the woods, there arose a little black cloud in the northwest, and 
Kembal immediately felt a force upon him, which made him not 



39G SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

able to avoid running upon stumps of trees that were before him, 
albeit he had a broad plain cart-way before him ; but though he 
had his axe also on his shoulder to endanger him in his falls, he 
could not forbear going out of his way to tumble over them. 
When he came below the meetinghouse, there appeared to him 
a little thing like a puppy, of a darkish color, and it shot back- 
ward and forward between his legs. He had the courage to use 
all possible endeavors of cutting it with his axe, but he could not 
hil it; the puppy gave a jump from him, and went, as to him it 
seemed, into the ground. Going a little further there appeared un- 
to him a black puppy, somewhat bigger than the first, but as black 
as a coal. Its motions were quicker than those of his axe ; it 
flew at his belly, and away; then at his throat; so over his 
shoulder one vvay, and then over his shoulder another way. His 
heart now began to faihhim, and he thought the dog would have 
tore his throat out; but he recovered himself, and called upon 
God in his distress, and naming the name of Jesus Christ, it van- 
ished away at once." Another witness, John Pressy, declared 
" that beingoneeveniogveryunaccountablybewildered, near afieid 
of Martin's, and several times, as one under an enchantment, re- 
turning to the place he had left, at length he saw a marvellous 
light, about the bigness of a half-bushel, near two rods out of the 
way. He gave it near forty blows, and felt it a palpable sub- 
stance. But going from it, his heels were struck up, and he was 
laid with his back on the ground, sliding, as he thought, into a 
pit, whence he recovered by taking hold on the bush ; although 
afterward he could find no such pit in the place. Having after 
his recovery, gone five or six rods, lie saw Susanna Martin stand- 
ing on his left hand, as the light had done before ; but they 
changed no words with one another. The next day it was upon 
inquiry understood that Martin was in a miserable condition by 
pains and hurls that vi^ere upon her." 

These tales have somewhat of novelty, Jbut others were deci- 
dedly adopted from the witch trials in Europe, and they even 
went so far as to make the pretended sufferers, when imder the 
influence of the " spirit," talk languages which they had never 
learned, such as Latin, and Greek, and even Hebrew, although 
it appeared that even Satan himself would not condescend to talk 
the barbarous jargon of the Indians.* It was the " shapes," or 

* Dr. Cotton Mather gives the following humorous description of the difficulty 
of acquiring the Indian languasre : "Behold new diffioultiL^s to be surmounted by 
our indefatigable Elliot ! He hires a native to teach him this exotic laiiiiUdKe, nn<'l, 
■with a laborious care and skill reduces it into a grammar, which idterwaid lie pub- 
lished. There is a letter or two of our alphabet which the Indians never had in 



THE LANGUAGE OF THE INDIANS. 397 

spectral appearances of the witches who tormented the sufferers, 
and performed all these mischievous pranks, and the strange per- 
version of justice which allowed the presumed acts of these 
spectres to be considered as the crimes of the individuals they rep- 
resented, rendered the only possible defence, the plea of alibi, 
inadmissible. The statement regarding" these spectral appear- 
ances were often as bold as they were extraordinary, and they 
found corroborative witnesses to support them. " It is well 
known," says Cotton Mather, in a subsequent history of the col- 
ony, " that these wicked spectres did proceed so far as to steal 
several quantities of money from divers people, part of which 
individual money was dropped sometimes out of the air, before 
sufficient spectators, into the hands of the afflicted, while the 
spectres were urging them to subscribe their covenant with death. 
Moreover, poisons, to the standers-by wholly invisibly, were 
sometimes forced upon the aliiicted ; which, when they have 
with much reluctancy swallowed, they have swollen presently, so 
that the common medicines for poisons have been found neces- 
sary to relieve them. Yea, sometimes the spectres in. the strug- 
gle have so dropped the poisons, that the standers-by have 
smelled them, and viewed them, and beheld the pillo\vs of the 
miserable stained with them. Yet more, the miserable have 
complained bitterly of burning rags run into their forcibly-dis- 
tended mouths ; and though nobody could see any such cloths, 
or, indeed, an)^ fires in the chambers, yet presently the scalds 
v.'ere seen plainly by everybody on the mouths of the complainers, 
and not only the smell, but the smoke, of the burning sensibly 
filled the chambers. Once more, the miserable exclaimed ex- 
tremely of branding-irons heating at the fire on the hearth to 
mark them ; now, though the standers-by could see no irons, yet 
they could see distinctly the print of them in the ashes, and 

theirs ; but if their alphabet be short, I am sure the words composed of it are long 
euoagh to tire the patience of any scholar in the world ; tiiey are sexquiped/dia 
verba, of which their lingo is composed ; one would ihuik they had been growing 
ever since Babel unto tlie d mensious to which they are now extended. For in- 
stance, if my reader will count how many hlters tliere in ihis one word, N-immat- 
rhelcodtaatamoongavjunnoiiash, when he has dons, for his reward, I'll tell him it 
signifies no more in English than '(;ur lust^;' and if I were to translate ' our Icjves,' 
it must hi' nothing sho;-ter than Noou'omanlaiirtnononJcoivinoiinnsh. Or, to gi> e my 
reaiier a longer \vord than either of these. KinnmogkoionnttooU-iimmooelitec.onir'iii- 
7i'!nno:iosh, is, in English, 'our question;' but I pray, sir, count die letters ! Nor do we 
fiLid in all ihislangnaee, the least sfH. iiy to. or derivaii;;n f"om, any European speech 
that; we are acqnainled with." He then adds : '■ 1 know not what thoaghts it w^ill 
produce in my reader when I inform hiiii, ihal O'jce finding that the daemons in a 
posses3=d young woman, unders nod th } Latin, and Greek, and Hebrew 1 u.guages, 
my curiosity led me to make trial of this Indian language, and the dajmons did seem- 
as if Ihey did not uadeisiandit." — IvIathkhs M.iGNALiA, book iii , p. 19a. 

34 



393 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

smell them too, as they were carried by the unseen furies unto the 
poor creatures for whom they were intended ; and those poor crea- 
tures were thereupon so stigmatized with them, that they will bear 
the marks of tliem to their dying day. Nor are these the tenth 
part of the prodigies that fell out among the inhabitants of New 
England. Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when 
hundreds of the most sober people in a country, where they have 
as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them 
to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward spirit of Saddu- 
cism can question them. I have not yet mentioned so much as 
one thing that will not be justified, if it be required, by the oaths 
of more considerate persons than any that can ridicule these odd 
phenomena." 

The moment the executions commenced, the evil, instead of 
stopping, spread wider and wider. The accused were multiplied 
in proportion to the accusers, and no one was for one moment 
sure that the next moment he might not be denounced and or- 
dered for trial, which was almost equivalent to being convicted. 
For so fully convinced were magistrates and ministers that Satan 
was in the midst of them, using human instruments to effect his 
purposes, that the slightest evidence was received with the utmost 
eagerness. The court met again on the 30th of June, and five 
more were condemned, who were all executed on the 19ihof July. 
Among these were Sarah Good and Rebecca Nurse, the two 
" goodwives" above mentioned. " On the trial of Sarah Good, 
one of the afflicted fell in a fit, and after coming out of it, she 
cried out of the prisoner for stabbing her in the hand with a 
knife, and that she had broken the knife in stabbing of^h'er; ac- 
cordingly a piece of the blade of a knife was found about her. 
Immediately information being given to the court, a young man 
was called, who produced a haft and part of the blade, which the 
court having viewed and compared, saw it to be the same. And 
upon inquiry, the young man affirmed that yesterday he hap- 
pened to break that knife, and that he cast away the upper part, 
this afflicted person being then present. The young man was 
dismissed, and she was bidden by the court not to tell lies ; and 
was improved afler (as she had been before) to give evidence 
against the prisoner." As to Goodwife Nurse, the jury at first 
brought her in not guilty ; on which the accusers and the afflicted 
suddenly raised a hideous outcry, pretending that she was tor- 
menting them again, and it being represented to the jury that 
they had not given due consideration to one expression of hers, 
they returned to reconsider their verdict, and sent her to the gal- 



EXECUTION OF GEOEGE BURROUGHS. 399 

lows. Like her companions in suffering, she persisted in decla- 
ring her innocence. 

At another court, on the 5th of August, six were condemned, 
who were all executed on the 19th, except Procters wife, who 
pleaded pregnane)". Among these was ]Mr. George Burroughs, 
a minister of the gospel, who provoked his judge by resting his 
defence on the bold argument, " that there neither are, nor ever 
were, witches that, having made a compact with the devil, can 
send a devil to torment other people at a distance." When 
brought to the place of execution, he addressed the multitude as- 
sembled around him with so much feeling, that many of the spec- 
tators were in tears, and all seemed to relent. The accusers 
cried out upon him, and said the black man was standing by him 
and dictating his discourse ; and Dr. Cotton ^Mather, who was 
present on horseback, came forward to address the crowd, assu- 
ring them that he was not a minister regularly ordained, intima- 
ting that his piety was all deception, and telling them that " the 
devil has often been transformed into an angel of light." Thus 
was the rising sympathy of the people checked, and the execu- 
tioner suffered to go through with his duties. 

Some persons began now to feel alarmed at the manner in 
which these proceedings multiplied, or were disgusted at the in- 
justice which they exhibited, though for some time it was dan- 
gerous to express such sentiments. One John Willard, who had 
been emploved to arrest those accused, refused to perform the 
office any longer, and he was immediately cried out upon by the 
accusers. He sought safety in flight, but he was pursued and 
overtaken, and he was one of those executed with Burroughs. 
Giles Cory was brought up for trial on the 16th of September, 
but indignant at the injustice which was shown to others, he re- 
fused to plead, and he was pressed to death. In the infliction 
of this punishment his tongue was forced out of his mouth, and 
the unfeeling sheriff forced it in again with his cane as the vic- 
tim lay in the agonies of death. On the 22d of September, eight 
more were executed ; on their way to the place of execution the 
cart which conveyed them was upset, and the " afflicted'" declared 
that the devil accompanied the cart, and that he overthrew it in 
order to retard their punishment. 

Nineteen individuals had now been hanged, in addition to the 
man who was pressed to death, and the maoistrates themselves 
seem to have been anxious to find some justification for their con- 
duct. Thereupon Cotton Mather at the express desire of the 
governor, prepared for the press reports of seven of the trials, 



400 SORCERY AND MAG[C. 

and justified ihem by examples taken from the similar trials in 
England,, and by the doctrines of the English writers in favor of 
the prosecutions for this crime. His book, entitled, " More Won- 
ders of the Invisible World," was published in the month of Oc- 
tober. The persecution received a check at this time from an- 
other circumstance. Mr. Hale, minister of Beverley, had been 
one of the warmest promoters of these prosecutions ; but in the 
month of October, the accusers, who were now aiming at more 
respectable people than at first, cried out upon this minister's 
wife. As he and his friends were fully convinced of her purity 
and innocence, this charge was treated as absurd, but it con- 
vinced Mr. Hale and others of the injustice of the whole proceed- 
ings. Still the leaders of the persecution persisted in their 
course, and to get over this serious difficulty, they raised the 
question whether the devil could assume the " shape" or spectre 
of a good person to afiiict his victims. Increase Mather, the 
principal of Harvard college, was requested to treat this question, 
which he did very learnedly, in a book entitled, " Cases of Coh- 
science concerning Witchcraft, and Evil Spirits personating 
Men," resolving it in the affirmative. People's faith, however, 
was so far shaken by these latter occurrences, that though the 
accusations continued, and new arrests were made daily, there 
were no more executions. The persecutors, disappointed in 
their thirst after the blood of their own species, now vented their 
rage upon inferior animals. A dog was strangely afflicted at 
Salem, upon which those who had the spectral sight declared 
that a brother of one of the justices afflicted the poor animal, by 
riding upon it invisibly. The man made his escape, but the dog 
was very unjustly hanged. Another dog was accused of afflict- 
ing others, who fell into tits the moment it looked upon them, and 
it also was killed. 

The infection vfas now communicated from Salem to other 
places. " About this time," says one of the writers of these 
events, " a new scene began. One Joseph Ballard, of Andover, 
vi^hose wife was ill, sent to Salem for some of those accusers, to tell 
him who afflicted his wife ; others did the like. Horse and man 
were sent from several places to fetch those accusers who had 
the spectral sight, that they might thereby tell who afHicted those 
that v/ere any way ill. When these came into any place where 
such were, usually they fell into a lit; after which, being asked 
who was it that afflicted the person, they would for the most part 
name one who they said sat on the head and another that sat on 
the lower part of the afflicted. More than fifty people of Aiido- 



RELEASE OF WITCHES. 401 

ver were thus complained of for afflicting their neighbors. Here 
it was that many accused themselves of riding upon poles through 
the air ; many parents believed their children to be vv^itches, and 
many husbands their wives." 

At Andover the accusations multiplied so rapidly, that a justice 
of the peace of that place, named Dudley Bradstreet, after com- 
mitting thirty or forty, became alarmed, and refused to grant any 
more warrants. The afflcted now cried upon the justice and his 
wife ; they said that he had killed nine persons by witchcraft, 
and they declared that they saw the ghosts of the murdered peo- 
ple hovering about him. Justice Bradstreet saw how things 
were going, and judged it advisable to make his escape. Soon 
after this, they cried out against a gentleman of Boston, who im- 
mediately obtained a writ of arrest against his accusers on a 
charge of defamation, and laid his damages at a thousand pounds. 
This bold proceeding did more than anything else to stop the ac- 
cusations, which irom that time began to fall into discredit. Some 
of those who had confessed, retracted their confessions. On the 
3d of January, 1693, in the superior court of Salem, of fifty-six 
bills of indictment containing charges of this kind, thirty were 
ignored, and of the other six-and-twenty, when they were put on 
their trial, three only were found guilty. At the end of January, 
seven who lay under condemnation were reprieved. 

About the month of April, Governor Phipps was recalled, and 
he signalized his departure by setting at liberty all the prisoners 
charged with witchcraft. They amounted at this time to about a 
hundred and fifty, of whom fifty had confessed themselves witch- 
es. About two hundred more had been accused, who were not 
yet placed under arrest. The people of Salem expected the 
worse consequences from this, as they considered it mistaken 
leniency, and they were astonished to find that the moment the 
accusations were discountenanced, there were no more afflicted 
— the witchciiaft ceased. People in general now began to re- 
fleet, were convinced of their error, and lamented it. Seized 
with remorse, their resentment fell first and principally on Mr. 
Paris, the minister of Salem village, with whom the accusations 
commenced ; many of his congregation withdrew from his com- 
munion, and they drew up articles against him. The disputes 
between the minister and his people lasted two or three years, 
and although he acknowledged his mistakes, and professed that 
he should be far from acting again upon the same principles, they 
v/ere not satisfied till he left them. In a strong remonstrance 
against him, thev enumerated the setting afloat of these accusa- 



402 SORCERY AND MAGIO. 

tions as his principal crime, and declared their opinion that, "by 
these practices and principles, he had been the beginner and pre- 
cursor of the sorest afflictions, not to this village only, but to this 
whole country, that ever did befall them." 

Some persons persisted in believing in the witchcraft, and in 
Satan's active agency in this affair, though they acknowledged 
that the accusations had been carried too far ; and among these 
were the two Mathers. Before the conclusion of the year an 
opportunity occurred for reviving the subject. On the 10th of 
September, 1693, a girl at Boston, named Margaret Rule, was 
seized with convulsions, and stated that she was visited by eight 
spectres, some of which she recognised as being those of persons 
she knew. Cotton Mather visited her, professed himself con- 
viiiced of the truth of her statement, and would soon have raised 
up a new flame. But there was an influential and intelligent 
merchant of Boston, named Robert Calef, who also visited Mar- 
garet Rule, and who formed a totally different opinion to that ex- 
pressed by Cotton Mather, whose doctrine of witchcraft he con- 
trpverted, and -he gained the better in the argument. From a 
book published by Calef, at Boston, under the title of " More 
Wonders of the Invisible World," we obtain the best and most 
intelligible account of the extraordinary proceedings at Salem 
and Andover. 

From this time we hear no more of witches in New England. 
Ashamed of their weakness, the people of Salem seem to have 
brooded over their past folly for several years. On the 17th of 
December, 1696, a fast was proclaimed, one of the reasons for 
which was, " That God would show us what we knew not, and 
help us wherein we have done amiss to do so no more ; and es- 
pecially that whatever mistakes on either hand had been fallen 
into, either by the body of this people, or any orders of men, re- 
ferring to the late tragedy raised among us by Satan and his in- 
struments through the awful judgment of God, he ^ji'ould humble 
us therefore, and pardon all the errors of his servants." At this 
fast one of the judges stood' up to declare publicly his remorse 
for the part he had taken in these lamented transactions. The 
jurors signed a paper also proclaiming their repentance, and 
ending with the declaration, "■ That we justly fear that we were 
sadly deluded and mistaken, for which we are much disquieted 
and distressed in our minds ; and do therefore humbly beg for- 
giveness, first of God, for Christ's sake, lor this our error ; and 
pray that God would not impute the guilt of it to ourselves or 
others; and we also pray that we may be considered candidly. 



THE DELUSION EXPOSED. 403 

and aright, by the living sufferers, as being then under the power 
of a strong and general delusion, utterly unacquainted with, and 
not experienced in, matters of that nature." The delusion was 
further exposed by voluntary confessions of those who had pre- 
viously confessed themselves witches, which they declared they 
had done only to save their lives. The following declaration, 
signed by several of the women who had acted as accusers, no 
doubt acquaints us with the secret of many of the witch-delusions 
in England. "Joseph Ballard of Andover's wife being sick," 
say they, " he either from himself, or the advice of others, fetched 
tvv^o of the persons called the afflicted persons from Salem vil- 
lage to Andover, which was the cause of that dreadful calamity 
which befell us at Andover. We were blindfolded, and our hands 
were laid on the afflicted persons, they being in their fits, and 
falling into these fits at our coming into their presence' and then 
they said that we were guilty of afflicting them, whereupon we 
were all seized as prisoners by a warrant from the justice of the 
peace, and forthwith carried to Salem ; and by reason of that 
sudden surprisal, we knowing ourselves altogether innocent of 
that crime, we were all exceedingly astonished, and amazed, and 
consternated, and afl'righted out of our reason ; and our dearest 
relations seeing us in that dreadful condition, and knowing our 
great danger, they out of tender love and pity, persuaded us to 
confess what we did confess ; and, indeed, that confession was 
no other than what was suggested to us by some gentlemen, they 
telling us that we were witches, and they knew it, and we knew 
it, and they knew that we knew it, which made us think that we 
were so, and our understanding, and our reason, and our faculties, 
being almost gone, we were not capable of judging of our con- 
dition ; as also the hard measures they used with us rendered us 
incapable of making any defence, but we said an3'thing and ev- 
erything they desired, and most of what we said was, in fact, 
but a consenting to what they said." 



404 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 



CHAPTER XXXII. 



CONCLUSION. 



The narrative of Satan's doings in New England may be 
looked upon as an appropriate conclusion to an historical sketch 
of the prosecutions for witchcraft. We see here combined in 
one short act the sudden force exercised by the superstition over 
the popular mind, the disasters to which it led, and the final tri- 
umph of good sense and honest feelings in dispelling the illu- 
sion. It was that good sense which was now overcoming pop- 
ular ignorance in most of the countries of Europe. 

In France, where in the earlier period the persecution of 
witches was most intense, the same circumstances had not ex- 
isted to keep it up as in England and Scotland. With the excep- 
tion of several cases of pretended possession, intrigues of the 
catholic priesthood, who thus practised on the credulity of the 
populace, which occurred at this time, we hear little of witch- 
craft in France during the latter half of the seventeenth century. 
The belief still existed among the peasantry, who, when blights 
and diseases fell upon their produce or stock unexpectedly, were 
too apt to ascribe it to such agency, but they were discounte- 
nanced by ihe better classes of society. In 1672, a great num- 
ber of shepherds vi^ere arrested in Normandy, on a charge of 
witchcraft, and prosecuted before the parliament of Eouen; but 
when the king was informed of it, he at once put a stop to the 
process by an order of council, directing the prisoners to be set 
at liberty This proceeding on the part of the king had the im- 
mediate efl'ect de faire taire le demon ! Yet a similar accusation 
was brought against the shepherds of Brie in 1691. 

Still the belief existed in sufficient force to admit of its being 
used as an instrument for indulging personal animosity, and that 
between a minister of the crown and one of the most distin- 
guished and celebrated of the marechals of Louis XIV. There 
lived at Paris four men who professed to be magicians, and pre- 
tended to be able to raise the devil at will ; they told people's for- 
tunes, helped them to recover things stolen or lost, and sold 
powders and unguents. Their names were Lavoisin, Lavigou- 
reux, and his brother, the latter a priest, and another priest named 
licsage. In the year 1680, these men M^ere arrested, and as the 



THE MARECHAL DE LUXEMBOURG. 405 

crimes in whicli they and many others were involved had usual- 
ly been punished by burning, a tribunal Avas appointed to sit at 
the arsenal, under the title of a chamhre ardente. Although few 
fires were eventually lit by the judgments of this court, a great 
number of persons were more or less compromised, and many of 
them belonging to the highest classes of society. Among them 
were two nieces of Cardinal Mazarin ; the countess of Soissons, 
who was cited before this tribunal, was so far implicated, that 
she was obliged to leave Paris and retire to Brussels. Most of 
these personages were probably led to consult the conjurers more 
by curiosity than Irom any other motive, and the whole matter 
was made a subject of ridicule and raillery in the fashionable 
world. When the duchess of Bouillon, who was one of the la- 
dies implicated in this afiair, Avas examined before the chamhre 
ardente, one of the judges, La Rejmie, who was not remarkable 
for beauty or politeness, asked her if she had seen the devil, and 
what he was like ; she replied, " Yes, I see him novv^ ; he is fort 
laid et fort vilain, and appears in the disguise of a conseiller 
d'etat !" 

It appears that the mareclial de Luxembourg had employed 
Lesage to draw his horoscope, and thus the name of this great 
man was introduced into the process. Louvois was at that time 
prime-minister of France, and having some cause of hostility 
against the marechal, he determined to make this an opportunity 
for indulging his animosity, and the marechal de Luxembourg 
was thrown into the Bastile. It appears that one of the mare- 
chal's agents named Bonard, had lost some papers of consequence 
belonging to his employer, and that, unable to discover any traces 
of them, he had consulted the priest Lesage, Avho instructed him 
how he was to visit the churches, recite psalms, and make con- 
fessions. Bonard did all this, but still he was as far from recov- 
ering his papers as ever. Then Lesage told him that a girl 
named Dupin knew something about them, and under his direc- 
tions, Bouard performed a conjuration to force her to bring them 
back, but without effect. Upon this it appears that Bonard had 
obtained the marechal's signature to a paper which turned out to 
be a compact with Satan, and which was produced at the trial. 
It would seem that the marechal had been concerned in some in- 
trigue with the girl Dupin. Lesage deposed that the marechal 
had addressed himself to him, and through him to the devil, to 
effect the death of this girl, who perhaps had been murdered, for 
men were brought forward who confessed themselves the assas- 
sins, and who declared that, by order of the raaredial de Luxem- 



406 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

bouro-, they had cut her in pieces and thrown the fragments into 
the river. The raarechal was confronted with Lesage, and with 
another priest and conjurer named Davaux, with whom he was 
accused of practising sorcer)^, for the purpose of killing more 
than one person. But he rebutted all these and other charges 
with indignation, and, instead of bringing him to a trial, Louvois 
caused him to be kept in close confinement, and took care that 
the process should be carried on as slowly as possible. It was 
only after fourteen months of imprisonment that he was set at 
liberty ; the accusations were dropped without any judgment, and 
he was restored to favor and to the high offices he had previous- 
ly held. The fqur magicians were less fortunate, for they had 
all been burnt. 

France had, howeA'er, the honor of leading the way in discour- 
aging prosecutions of this kind. The irreligion and skepticism 
of the court of Charles II., contributed no doubt toward produ- 
cing the same effect in England, where many, who before ven- 
tured only to doubt, now hesitated not to treat the subject with 
ridicule. Although works like those of Baxter and Glanvill had 
still their weight with many people, yet, in the controversy which 
was now carried on upon this subject through the instrumentality 
of the press, those who wrote against the popular creed had cer- 
tainly the best of the argument. Still it happened from their 
form and character that the books written to expose the absurd- 
ity of the belief in sorcerj^, were restricted in their circulation 
to the more educated classes, while popular tracts in defence of 
witchcraft, and collections of cases were printed in a cheaper 
form, and widely distributed among that class in society where 
the belief was most firmly rooted. The eifect of these popular 
publications has continued in some districts down to the present 
day. Thus the press, the natural tendency of which was to en- 
lighten mankind, was made to increase ignorance by pandering 
to the superstitions of the multitude. 

An instance of the continuance of the belief which had in for- 
mer times produced the sacrifice of so much human life, occurred 
at the beginning of the year 1712, in the village of Walkern, in 
the north of the county of Hertford. There was a poor woman 
in that town named Jane Wenham, who, it appears, had for some 
time been looked upon by the more ignorant of her neighbors as 
a witch. When the horses or cattle of the farmers of that parish 
died, they usually ascribed their losses to this woman's sorcery. 
This was particularly the case v\'ith a farmer named John Chapman, 
one of whose laborers, named Matthew Gilson, examined on the 



JANE WENHAM. 407 

fourteenth of February, declared, " that on New Year's day last 
past, he carrying straw upon a fork from Mrs. Gardiner's barn, 
met Jane Wenham, who asked him for some straw, which he 
refused to give her ; then she said she would take some, and ac- 
cordingly took- some away from this informant. And further, this 
informant saith, that on the 29th of January last, when this in- 
formant was thrashing in the barn of his master, John Chapman, 
an old woman in a riding-hood or cloak, he knows not which, 
came to the barn-door, and asked him for a pennyworth of straw ; 
he told her he could give her none, and she went away mutter- 
ing. And this informant saith, that after the woman was gone 
he was not able to work, but ran out of the barn as far as a place 
called Munder's hill (which was above three miles from Wal- 
kern), and asked at a house there for a pennyv/orth of straw, and 
they refused to give him any; he went further to some dur\g- 
heaps, and took some straw thence, and pulled off" his shirt, and 
brought it home in his shirt; he knows not what moved him to 
this, but says he was forced to it he knows not how." Another 
witness declared that he saw Matthew Gilson returning with the 
straw in his shirt ; that he moved along at a great pace, and that 
instead of passing over a bridge, he walked straight through the 
water. 

John Chapman conceived now that his suspicions were fully 
verified, and meeting Jane Wenham soon afterward, he applied 
to her in anger several offensive epithets, of which that of " witch" 
was the least opprobrious. On the 9th of February, Jane AVen- 
ham made her complaint to Sir Henry Chauncy, who was a ma- 
gistrate, and obtained a warrant against Chapman for defamation. 
In the sequel, at the recommendation of this magistrate, the quar- 
rel between Jane Wenham and the farmer was referred to the 
decision of the minister of Walkern, the Rev. Mr. Gardiner, who 
appears to have spoken somewhat harshly to the woman, advi- 
sing her to live more peaceably with her neighbors, and con- 
demned Chapman to pay her one shilling. 

As far as we can see, Jane Wenham took the most sensible 
course to retrieve herself from the imputation of being a witch ; 
but Mr. Gardiner, although a clergyman of the church of Eng- 
land, was as firm a believer in Avitchcraft as Farmer Chapman, 
and he fancied that he had provoked the poor woman by not giv- 
ing her the justice she expected. His judgment was delivered 
in the kitchen of the parsonage-house, where a maid-servant, 
between sixteen and seventeen years of age, named Anne Thorn, 
was sitting by the fireside, who had put her knee out the even- 



403 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

ing before, and had just had it set. It appears that the supposed 
witch resolved to talie vengeance on this poor girl for the olience 
committed by her master. Jane Wenham and Chapman were 
gone, and Mr. Gardiner had entered the parlor to his wife, ac- 
companied by a neighbor named Bragge. These three persons 
deposed at the subsequent trial, that " Mr Gardiner had not been 
in the parlor with his wife and Mr. Bragge above six or seven 
minutes at most since he left Anne Thorn sitting by the fire, 
when he heard a strange yelling noise in the kitchen, and when 
he went out and found this Anne Thorne stripped to her shirt 
sleeves, howling and wringing her hands in a dismal manner, and 
speechless, he calling out, Mrs. Gardiner and Mr. Bragge came 
immediately to him. Mrs. Gardiner seeing her servant in that 
sad condition, asked her what was the matter with her. She 
not beiiig able to speak, pointed earnestly at a bundle which lay 
at her feet; which Mrs. Gardiner took up and unpinned, and 
found it to be the girl's gown and apron, and a parcel of oaken 
twigs with dead leaves wrapped up therein. As soon as this bun- 
dle was opened, Anne Thorn began to speak, crying out, 'I'm 
ruined and undone ;' and after she had a little recovered herself, 
gave the following relation of what had befallen her. She said 
when she was left alone she found a strange roaming in her 
hand (I use her own expressions) ^ her mind ran upon Jane Wen- 
ham, and she thought she must run some whither ; that according- 
ly she ran up the close, but looked back several times at the 
house, thinking she should never see it more ; that she climbed 
over a five-bar gate, and ran along the highway up a hill ; that 
there she met two of John Chapman's men, one of whom took 
hold of her hand, saying, she should go with them ; but she was 
forced away from them, not being able to speak, either to them, 
or to one Daniel Chapman, whom, she said, she met on horse- 
back, and would fain have spoken to him, but could not; then 
she made her way toward Cromer, as far as a place called Hock- 
ney lane, where she looked behind her, and saw a little old wo- 
man muffled in a riding-hood, who asked her whither she was 
going. She answered, to Cromer to fetch some sticks to make 
her a fire ; the old woman told her there were now no sticks at 
Cromer, and bade her go to that oak-tree, and pluck some thence, 
which she did, and laid them upon the ground. The old woman 
bade her pull off her gown and apron, and wrap the sticks in 
them, and asked her w-hether she had e'er a pin. Upon her an- 
swering she had none, the old Vvroraan gave her a large crooked 
pin, bade her pin up her bundle, and then vanished away ; after 



ANNE THORNE'S ADVENTURES. 409 

which she ran home with her- bundle of sticks, and sat down in 
the kitchen stripped, as Mr. Gardiner found her. This is the 
substance of what she related, upon which Mrs. Gardiner cried 
out, ' The girl has been in the same condition with Chapman's 
man ; but we will burn the witch ;' alluding to a received notion, 
that when the thing bewitched is burned the witch is forced to 
come in ; accordingly she took the sticks, together with the pin, 
and threw them into the fire. Immediately, in the instant, that 
the sticks were flaming, Jane Wenham came into the room, and 
inquired for Elizabeth, the mother of Anne Thorne, saying she 
had an errand to do to her from Ardley Bury (Sir Henry Chaun- 
cey's house), to wit, that she must go thither to wash the next 
day. Now this Mother Thorne had been in the house all the time 
that Jane Wenham was there with John Chapman, and heard 
nothing of it, and was then gone home. Mrs. Gardiner bad Jane 
Wenham go to Elizabeth Thorne, and tell her there was work 
enough for her there ; on which she departed. And upon in- 
quiry made afterward, it was found that she never was ordered 
to deliver any such errand from Ardley Bury." 

Here was an excellent groundwork for an accusation of witch- 
craft. Chapman's two men, and the horseman, deposed to meet- 
ing Anne Thorne on the road, as she described; and others of 
Jane Wenham's enemies testified that other people had been be- 
witched by her. - All received encouragement from the readiness 
of the clergyman to promote the persecution, and a warrant was 
obtained from Sir Henry Chauncey to arrest the supposed witch. 
The examinations were taken before Sir Henry, at Ardley Bury, 
and he directed four women to search Jane Wenham's body for 
marks, but none were found. Next day the examination was 
continued, and the evidence of the Gardiners was taken. Jane 
Wenham expressed her horror of being sent to jail, earnestly 
protested her innocence, entreating Mrs. Gardiner not to swear 
against her, and off'ering to submit to trial by swimming in the 
water. Sir Henry, who seems to have yielded to the prejudices 
of the prosecutors in most things, refused to allow of this mode 
of trial. But the vicar of Ardley, no less superstitious than the 
rector of Walkern, tried her with the Lord's Prayer, which she 
repeated incorrectly, and he subsequently induced her, by fright 
and torment, to confess that she was a witch and had intercourse 
with Satan, and to accuse three women of Walkern as her con- 
federates, who were also put under arrest. 

Jane Wenham was now committed, and her trial came on on 
the 4th of March, before Justice Powell, when no less than six- 

35 



410 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

teen witnesses, among whom were three clergymen, were heard 
against the prisoner. The lawyers refused to draw up the in- 
dictment for any other charge than that of " conversing with the 
devil in the form of a cat," which, to the great anger of the pros- 
ecutors, threw an air of ridicule over the whole proceeding. 
Yet upon this indictment, in spite of her declarations of inno- 
cence, the Hertfordshire jury found her guilty. The judge was 
obliged to pronounce sentence of death, as a matter of form ; but 
he subsequently obtained her pardon, and a gentleman of more 
enlightened mind than the people of Walkern, Colonel Plummer, 
of Gilston in the same county, took her under his protection, and 
placed her in a cottage near his own house, where she passed 
the rest of her life in a quiet inoffensive manner. 

Few events of this kind have caused a greater sensation than 
the case of Jane Wenham. The report of the trial passed through 
several editions in a few days, and gave rise to a very bitter con- 
troversy, in which several clergymen joined in the cry against 
the innocent victim. The dispute seems to have become in some 
degree identified with the bitter animosities then existing between 
the church and the dissenters — it was just the time when the in- 
tolerant party, with their hero Sacheverell, had gained the upper 
hand, and they seemed not unwilling to recall into force even the 
old degrading belief in witchcraft, if they could make it an in- 
strument for effecting their purposes. But the most important 
result of this trial, and the controversy to which it gave rise, was 
the publication, two or three years afterward, of the " Historical 
Essay concerning Witchcraft," by the king's chaplain in ordinary, 
Dr. Francis Hutchinson. This book may be considered as the 
last blow at witchcraft, which from this time found credit only 
among the most ignorant part of the population. 

The case of Jane Wenham is the last instance of a witch be- 
ing condemned by the verdict of an English jury. When the 
prosecutors were no longer listened to in courts of justice, they 
either ceased to find objects of pursuit, or they appealed for judg- 
ment to the passions of the uneducated peasantry. An occurrence 
of this kind, no less bi'utal than tragical, is said to have led to the 
final repeal of the witchcraft act. The scene is again laid in 
Hertfordshire. In the middle of the last century, there lived at 
Tring, in that county, a poor man and his wife of the name of 
Osborne, each about seventy years of age. During the rebellion 
of 'forty-five, Mother Osborne, as she was popularly called, went 
to one Butterfield, who kept a dairy at Gubblecot, to beg for some 
buttermilk, but he said with great brutality that he had not enough 



THE MURDER AT TRING. 411 

for his hogs. The old woman, provoked by this treatment, went 
away, telling him that the pretender would soon have him and 
his hogs too. The connection with what followed perhaps arose 
from the popular outcry which had long coupled the pretender 
with Satan. Some time afterward, some of Butterfield's calves be- 
came distempered, and the ignorant people of the neighborhood, 
who had heard the story of the buttermilk, declared that they were 
bewitched by Mother Osborne. In course of time Butterfield left 
his dairy, and took a public-house in the same village, where, 
about the beginning of the year 1751, he was troubled with fits, 
and, although he had been subject to similar fits in former times, 
these also were now ascribed to Mother Osborne. He was per- 
suaded that the doctors could do him no good, and was advised 
to send for an old woman out of Northamptonshire, a white witch, 
who had the reputation of being skilful in counteracting the effects 
of sorcery. This woman confirmed the opinion already afloat 
of the cause of Butterfield's disorder, and she directed that six 
men should watch his house day and night, with staves, pitch- 
forks, and other weapons, at the same time hanging something 
about th^r necks, which she said was a charm to secure them 
from being bewitched themselves. This produced, as might be 
expected, no effect, and the accusation might have dropped ; but 
some persons, desirous of collecting together a large number of 
persons with a lucrative object, caused notice to be given at sev- 
eral of the market-towns around that witches were to be tried by 
ducking, at Longmarston, on the 22d of April. The consequence 
was that a vast concourse of people assembled at Tring, on the 
day announced. The parish officers had removed the old couple 
from the workhouse into the church, for security ; upon which 
the mob, after searching in vain the workhouse, and even look- 
ing into the salt-box to see if the witch had transformed herself 
into any diminutive form that could be concealed there, exhibited 
their disappointment in breaking the windows, pulling down the 
pales, and demolishing a part of the house. They then seized 
upon the governor, and collecting together a quantity of straw, 
threatened to drown him and set fire to the town, unless the im- 
fortunate couple were delivered up to them. Fear at length in- 
duced the parish officers to yield, and the two wretches were 
stripped stark naked by the mob, their thumbs tied to their toes, 
and thus, each wrapped in a loose. sheet, they were dragged two 
miles, and thrown into a muddy stream. A chimney-sweeper, 
named Colley, one of the ringleaders, seeing that the poor wo- 
man did not sink, went into the pond and turned her over sev- 



412 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

eral times with a stick, by which her body slipped out of the 
sheet and was exposed naked. In this condition, and half choked 
with mud, she was thrown on the bank, and there kicked and 
beaten till she expired. Her husband died also of the injuries 
he had received. The man who had superintended these brutal 
proceedings went round to the crowd collecting money for the 
amusement he had afforded them ! The coroner's inquest brought 
a verdict of wilful murder against several persons by name, but 
the only one brought to justice was the sweep Colley, who was 
executed, and afterward hung in chains, for the murder of Ruth 
Osborne. 

From this time witchcraft has attracted no attention in Eng- 
land, except as a vulgar superstition in some rude localities where 
the schoolmaster had not yet penetrated. In Scotland the strug- 
gle between superstition and common sense continued longer and 
more obstinate. A few of the later cases of Scottish sorcery 
were collected by George Sinclair, in a little book published in 
the beginning of the last century, under the title of " Satan's In- 
visible World Discovered " One or two of these will serve to 
show the form which witchcraft assumed in Scotland at the time 
when it was falling into discredit among men of education. 

There was a man named Sandie Hunter, who called himself 
Sandie Hamilton, but was better known by the nickname of Hat- 
taraick, given him, it seems, by the devil. He was first a " nolt- 
herd" in East Lothian, but he had assumed the character of a 
conjurer, curing men and beasts by spells and charms. " His 
charms sometimes succeeded, sometimes not." However, the 
extent of Hattaraick's practices seems to have raised the jeal- 
ousy of Satan. " On a day herding his kine upon a hill-side in 
the summer-time, the devil came to him in the form of a mede- 
ciner, and said, ' Sandie, you have too long followed my trade, 
and never acknowledged me for your master ; you must now take 
with me, and be my servant, and I will make you more perfect 
in your calling.' Whereupon the man gave up himself to the 
devil, and received his mark, with this new name. After this he 
grew very famous through the country, for his charming, and 
curing of diseases in men and beasts, and turned a vagrant fel- 
low, like a jockey, gaining meal, and flesh, and money, by his 
charms ; such was the ignorance of many at the time, whatever 
house he came to, none durst refuse. Hattaraick an alms, rather 
for his ill than his good. One day he came to the yait (gate) 
of Samuelston, when some friends after dinner were going to 
horse, a young gentleman, brother to the lady, seeing him, 



SANDIE HUNTER. 413 

switched him about the ears, saying. ' You warlock cairle, what 
have you to do here V Whereupon the fellow goes away grum- 
bling, and was overheard say, ' You shall dear buy this ere it be 
long.' This was damnum minatum. The young gentleman con- 
veyed his friends a way off, and came home that way again, 
w^here he supped. After supper, taking his horse, and crossing 
Tyne water to go home, he rode through a shady piece of haugh, 
commonly called Cotters, and the evening being somewhat dark, 
he met with some persons there that begat a dreadful consterna- 
tion in him, which, for the most part, he would never reveal. 
This was malum secutum. When he came home, the servants 
observed terror and fear in his countenance. The next day he 
became distracted, and was bound for several days. His sister, 
the lady Samuelston, hearing of it, was heard say, ' Surely that 
knave Hattaraick is the cause of his trouble, call for him in all 
haste.' When he had come to her, ' Sandie,' said she, ' what is 
this you have done to my brother William V — ' I told him,' says 
he, ' I should make him repent his striking of me at the yait late- 
ly.' She giving the rogue fair words, and promising him his 
pock full of meal, with beef and cheese, persuaded the fellow to 
cure him again. He undertook the business, ' but I must first,' 
says he, ' have one of his sarks ;' which was soon gotten. What 
pranks he played with it can not be known ; but within a short 
while the gentleman recovered his health. When Hattaraick 
came to receive his wages, he told the lady, ' Your brother Wil- 
liam shall quickly go off the country, but shall never return.' 
She knowing the fellow's prophesies to hold true, caused her 
brother to make a disposition to her of all his patrimony, to the 
defrauding of his younger brother, George. After that this war- 
lock had abused the country for a long time, he was at last ap- 
prehended at Dunbar, and brought into Edinburgh, and burnt up- 
on the castle hill." 

Another extraordinary case occurred about the end of August, 
1696. One Christian Shaw, the daughter of John Shaw, of Bar- 
garran, in the shire of Renfrevi^, about eleven years of age, per- 
ceiving one of the maids of the house, named Catharine Camp- 
bell, to steal and drink some milk, she told her mother of it. 
Whereupon the maid, " being of a proud and revengeful humor, 
and a great cursor and swearer, did, in a great rage, thrice im- 
precate the curse of God upon the child, an"^d utter these words, 
' the devil harle your soul through hell !' On Friday following, one 
Agnes Nasmith came to Bargarran's house where she asked the 
said Christian how the lady and young child were, and how old 

35* 



414 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

the young child was. To which Christian replied, * What do I 
know V Then Agnes asked, how herself did, and how old she 
was. To which she answered that she was well, and in the 
eleventh year of her age. On Saturday night thereafter, the child 
went to bed in good health ; but so soon as she was asleep, she 
began to cry, ' Help, help ;' and did fly over the resting-bed 
where she was lying, with such violence, that her brains had 
been dashed out, if a woman had not broken the force of the 
child's motion, and remained as if she had been dead, for the 
space of half an hour. After this she was troubled with sore 
pains, except in some short intervals, and when any of the peo- 
ple present touched any part of her body, she did cry and screech 
with such vehemence, as if they had been killing her, but would 
not speak. Some days thereafter she fell a crying that Catha- 
rine Campbell and Agnes Nasmith were cutting her side and 
other parts of her body. In this condition she continued a month, 
with some variation, both as to the fits and intervals. She did 
thrust out of her mouth parcels of hair, some curled, some plait- 
ed, some knotted, of different colors, and in large quantities, and 
likewise coal cinders, which were so hot that they could scarce- 
ly be handled. One of which Dr. Brisbane, being by her when 
she took it out of her mouth, felt it to be hotter than any one's 
body could make it. The girl continued a long time in this con- 
dition, till the government began to take notice of it, and gave 
commission to some honorable gentlemen for the trials of those 
two, and several others concerned in these practices ; and being 
brought before the judges, two of their accomplices confessed the 
crime ; whereupon they were condemned and executed." 

Somewhere" about the same time an equally strange affair oc- 
curred at the town of Pittenweem, in Fife, which may also be 
told in the words of Sinclair. " Peter Morton, a smith at Pit- 
tenweem, being desired by one Beatie Laing to do some work 
for her, which he refused, excusing himself in respect he had 
been pre-engaged to serve a ship with nails, within a certain 
time ; so that till he had finished that wojrk, he could not engage 
in any other; that notwithstanding the said Beatie Laing de- 
clared herself dissatisfied, and vowed revenge. The said Peter 
Morton afterward being indisposed, coming by the door, saw a 
small vessel full of water, and a coal of fire ' slockened' in the 
water ; so perceiving an alteration in his health, and remember- 
ing Beatie Laing's threatenings, he presently suspects devilry in 
the matter, and quarels the thing. Thereafter, finding his indis- 
position growing worse and worse, being tormented and pricked 



BEATIE LAING. 415 

as with bodkins and pins, lie openly lays tlie blame upon witch- 
craft, and accused Beatie Laing. He continued to be tormented, 
and she was, by warrant, apprehended, with others in Pitten- 
weem. No natural reason could be given for his distemper, his 
face and neck being dreadfully distorted, his back prodigiously 
rising and falling, his belly swelling and falling on a sudden, his 
joints pliable, and constantly so stiff as no human power could 
bow them. Beatie Laing and her hellish companions being in 
custody, were brought to the room where he was, and his face 
covered, he told his tormentors were in the room, naming them. 
And though formerly no confession had been made, Beatie Laing 
confessed her crime, and accused several others as accessories. 
The said Beatie having confessed her compact with the devil, 
and using of spells, and particularly her ' slockening' the coal in 
water, she named her associates in revenge against Peter Mor- 
ton, viz., Janet Cornfoot, Lillie Wallace, and Lawson, who had 
framed a picture of wax, and every one of the forenamed persons 
having put their pin in the picture for torture. They could not 
tell what had become of the image, but thought the devil had 
stolen it, whom they had seen in the prison. Beatie Laing like- 
wise said, that one Isobel Adams, a young lass, was also in com- 
pact with the devil. This woman was desired to see with Beatie, 
which she refused ; and Beatie let her see a man at the other 
end of the table, who appeared as a gentleman, and promised her 
all prosperity in the world ; she promised her service to him, and 
he put his mark on her flesh, which was very painful. She was 
shortly after ordered to attend the company, to go to one Mac- 
Grigor's house, to murder him ; he awaking when they Avere 
there, and recommending himself to God, they were forced to 
withdraw. This Isobel. Adams appeared ingenuous, and very 
penitent in her confessions ; she said, he who forgave Manas- 
seh's witchcrafts might forgive hers also ; and died very peni- 
tent, and to the satisfaction of many. This Beatie Laing was 
suspected by her husband, long before she was laid in prison by 
warrant of the magistrates. The occasion was thus : she said, 
that she had packs of very good wool, which she instantl)^ sold, 
and coming home with a black horse which she had with her, 
they drinking till it was late in the night ere they came home, 
that man said, ' What shall I do with the horse V She replied, 
' Cast the bridle on his neck, and you will be quit of him ;' and, 
as her husband thought, the horse flew with a great noise away 
in the air. They were, by a complaint to the privy council, pros- 
ecuted by her majesty's advocate, in 1704, but all set at liberty 



416 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

save one who died in Pittenweem. Beatie Laing died unde- 
sired, in her bed, in St. Andrews ; all the rest died miserable and 
A'iolent deaths." 

So says Mr. George Sinclair, who has, however, omitted to 
inform us of the most frightful part of this story. Janet Corn- 
foot, one of the -persons accused, made her escape from prison, 
but she was recaptured, and brought back to Pittenweem, where, 
falling into the hands of a ferocious mob, they pelted her with 
stones, swung her on a rope extended from a ship to the shore, 
and at length put an end to her sufferings by throwing a door 
over her as she lay exhausted on the beach, and heaping stones 
on it till she was pressed to death. This was the woman who, 
according to Sinclair, " died in Pittenweem." The magistrates 
had made no attempt to rescue the miserable woman from the 
hands of her tormentors, and they were now violently attacked 
in print for their conduct, and were as warmly defended by some 
advocates. The agitation on the subject of the union with Eng- 
land contributed to the impunity v/ith which the murderers es- 
caped. But the controversy it occasioned, joined with the hor- 
ror which such a barbarous outrage excited, tended more than 
anything else to open people's eyes in Scotland to the absurdity 
and wickedness of the prosecutions for witchcraft. It required, 
however, a few more instances, remarkable chiefly for their ab- 
surdity, to bring them entirely into discredit. In 1718, a carpenter 
in the shire of Caithness, named William Montgomery, was infested 
at night with cats, which, according to the evidence of his ser- 
vant-maid, " spoke among themselves," and in a violent attack 
upon them with every weapon within his reach, he inflicted per- 
sonal injury to a very considerable extent. Two women were 
believed to have died in consequence ol these injuries, and a 
third, in a weak state, was imprisoned and compelled to confess 
not only that she was one of the offending cats, but to declare 
against a number of her confederates in witchcraft. A cen- 
tury earlier, no doubt this confession would have been fatal to 
most of the old women in the neighborhood ; but times were 
changed, and the lord advocate, on being applied to, put a stop 
to all further proceedings. In 1720, some old women of Calder 
were imprisoned for certain pretended sorceries exercised on a 
boy, the son of James, Lord Torpichen, but the officers of the 
crown would not proceed to a trial. Yet two years later, a poor 
woman was burnt as a witch in the county of Sutherland, by or- 
der, of the sheriff", Captain David Ross, of Littledean. This was 



WITCHCRAFT IN THE ISLAND MAGEE. 417 

the last sentence of death for witchcraft that was ever passed 
in Scotland. 

It appears that in Ireland the law against witchcraft has never 
been repealed, a circumstance that can only be explained on the 
supposition that.since witchcraft began to fall into discredit it has 
never, or very rarely, been appealed to. In 1711, there occurred 
a case of witchcraft among the Scottish presbyterians of the 
island Magee, in Ulster, which excited so much interest, at least 
among the people of that persuasion, that it has been printed over 
and over again, the edition I have before me bearing date in 1822, 
upward of one hundred years after that of the event it commem- 
orates. There is something peculiarly Irish in the story — it is a 
house, or rather a family, haunted by a spirit sent by witches. 
Mrs. Anne Hattridge was the widow of the presbyterian minis- 
ter of the district just mentioned, and was living with her son, 
James Hattridge. At the beginning of September, 1710, the 
house began to be disturbed by an invisible visiter, vvho threw 
stones and turf about, pulled the pillows and bed-clothes off the 
bed, and played a variety of other disagreeable pranks. Once 
it appeared in the shape of a cat, which they killed and threw 
into the yard, but when they looked for the body it had disap- 
peared. •" There was little remarkable for several days after, 
unless it were that her cane would be taken away, and be mis- 
sing several days together; until the 11th of December, 1710, 
when the aforesaid Mrs. Hattridge was sitting at the kitchen fire, 
in the evening before daylight-going, a little boy (as she and the 
servants supposed) came in and sat down beside her, having an 
old black bonnet on his head, with short black hair, a half-worn 
blanket about him, trailing on the ground behind him, and a torn 
black vest under it. He seemed to be about ten or twelve years 
old, but he still covered his face, holding his arm with a piece 
of the blanket before it. She desired to see his face but he took no 
notice of her. Then she asked him several questions ; viz., if 
he was cold or hungry ; if he would have any meat ; where he 
came from, and whither he was going. To which he made no 
answer, but getting up, danced very nimbly, leaping higher than 
usual, and then ran out of the house as far as the end of the gar- 
den, and sometimes into the cow-house, the servants running af- 
ter him to see where he would go, but soon lost sight of him ; 
but when they returned, he would be close after them in the 
house, which he did above a dozen times. At last, the little girl 
seeing her master's dog coming in, said, ' Now my master is com- 
ing, he will take a course with this troublesome creature ;' upon 



418 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

which he immediately went away, and troubled them no more 
till the month of February, 1711." 

On the 11th of February, a volume of sermons that Mrs. Hat- 
ridge was reading, suddenly disappeared in an unaccountable 
manner. " Next day, the apparition formerly mentioned, came 
to the house, and after having broken a quarry of glass in the 
kitchen window, on the side of the house, next the garden, he 
thrust in his arm with the book in his hand open, and entered 
into a conference with a girl of the house, called Margaret Spear, 
the particulars of which are as follows : — 

" Apparition. Do you want a book ? 

" Girl. No. 

" Appar. How come you to lie ? for this is the book which the 
old gentlewoman wanted (lost) yesterday. 

" Girl. How came you by it ? 

" Appar. I went down quietly to the parlor, when you were 
all in the kitchen, and found it lying upon a shelf, with a bible 
and a pair of spectacles. 

" Girl. How came it that you did not take the Bible too ? 

" Appar. It was too heavy to carry. 

" Girl. Will you give it back 1 for my mistress can't want it 
any longer. 

" Appar. No, she shall never get it again. 

" Girl. Can you read on it 1 

" Appar. Yes. 

" Girl. Who taught you ? 

" Appar. The devil taught me. 

" Girl. The Lord bless me from thee ! thou hast got ill lear 
f learning J. 

"Appar. Ay, bless yourself twenty times, but that shall, not 
save you. 

•' Girl. What will you do to us ? (Mr. Hattridge's son, about 
eight years of age, was with her at the time.) 

" Upon which it pulled out a sword and thrust it in at the win- 
dow, and said it would kill all in the house with that sword ; at 
which the child said, ' Meg, let us go into the room and bar the 
door, for fear it should kill us,' which they did ; then it jeered 
them, saying, ' Now you think you are safe enough, but I'll get 
in yet.' 

" What way? for we have the street-door shut. 

" Appar. I can come in by the least hole in the house, like a 
cat or mouse, for the devil can make me anything I please. 



THE TROUBLESOME VISITER. 419 

" Girl. God bless me from thee, for thou art no earthly crea- 
ture if you can do that. 

" Upon which it took up a stone of considerable bigness, and 
threw it in at the parlor-window, which upon trial could not be 
put out at the same place, and then went away for a little time. 
A little after, the girl and one of the children came out of the 
parlor to the kitchen, and looking out of the window, saw the 
apparition catching a turkey-cock, which he threw over his shoul- 
der, holding him by the tail ; and the cock making a great splut- 
ter with his feet, the book before mentioned was, as they thought, 
spurred out of the loop of the blanket he had about him ; but he, 
taking no notice, run along the side of the house, and. leaped, 
with the cock on his back, over a wall at the west end of the 
garden, leaping a great deal higher than the wall. The girl, 
thinking this a good opportunity to get the book, told Mrs. Hat- 
tridge ; upon which she, with the girl and a little boy, went to the 
garden, and got the book, without any harm done to it. At the 
same time they looked about the garden and fields adjoining, but 
could see nobody. There was no other person about the house 
at that time except children. A little after, the girl went to the 
window in the parlor, and looking out of the casement, saw the 
apparition again, with the turkey-cock lying on its back before 
him, he endeavoring to get his sword drawn to kill it, as she ap- 
prehended, but the cock got away. It then looked for the book 
in the loop of the blanket, and missing it, as she apprehended, 
threw away the blanket, and ran nimbly up and down upon the 
search for it. A little after, it came back with a club, and broke 
the glass of the side window in the parlor, and then went to the 
end window, through which the girl was looking, and pulled off, 
the casement glass (not leaving one whole quarry in it), and left 
it lying on the south side of the garden. A little after, the girl 
ventured to look out of the broken window, and saw it as it were 
digging near the end of the house with the sword. She asked 
what he was doing 1 He answered, ' Making a grave.' 

" Girl. For whom ? 

" Appar. For a corpse which will come out of this house very 
soon. 

" Girl. Who will it be ? • 

" Appar. I '11 not tell you that yet. Is your master at home 1 

" Giri: Yes. 

" Appar. How can you lie 1 he is abroad, and is dead fourteen 
days ago. 

" Girl. Of what sickness did he die ? 



420 SORCERY AND MAGIC. 

" Appar. I '11 not tell you that. 

" After this it went over the hedge, as if it had been a bird 
flying. Some persons of the neighborhood came in immediately 
after, and being told, made a diligent search, but nothing could 
be seen. Thus it continued from eight in the morning till two 
or three in the afternoon, throwing a great many stones, turf, etc., 
in at the windows, to the great terror of those in the house." 

Not long after this old Mrs. Hattridge was taken ill, and 
died. But the spirit still haunted the house, and tormented a 
young lady, a relative of the family, who had come to live there. 
Mary Dunbar, for this was her name, was seized with a strange 
disease on the 28th of February, accompanied with fits, in the 
course of which she had the spectral vision, as it was called, of 
certain women of the neighborhood, who she said, had sent 
thither the tormenting spirit. All the other symptoms usually 
exhibited by persons bewitched followed in due course, and sev- 
eral persons whom she accused in her trances were taken into 
custody and imprisoned at Carrickfergus to await their trial. 
The jury brought them in guilty, but they appear not to have 
been executed. 

From this time, in Europe at least, sorcery and magic hold no 
longer a place in the history of mankind. The magician disap- 
peared more rapidly than the witch, because he belonged to the 
class of society in which the progress of intelligence was more 
decided ; but we have seen that, as the agitation which brought 
it into importance subsided, and it could no longer be made a 
useful instrument in political or religious warfare, sorcery became 
more trivial and ridiculous in its details, until it was discarded 
even amonsf the vulgar. 



THE END. 



A CATALOGUE 



OF 



BOOKS, 



CLINTON HALL, N. Y. 

AND FOR SALE BY MOST BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED STATES. 

THE PICTORIAL BIBLE, 

Price Six Dollars. 

The Pictorial Bible, being the Old and New Testaments, according to 
the authonzed version: illustrated with more than one thousand en- 
gravings, representing the Historical Events after celebrated pictures • 
the Landscape Scenes from original drawings or from authentic en- 
gravmga: and the subjects of Natural History, Costume, and Antiqui- 
ties, from the best sources. With an elegantly engraved JFamily 
Record, and a new and authentic Map of Palestine. 

thl'i^ft'^fT^ ^^I'Joniseen a more attractive work, and have no doubt that 
the cost of the enterprise wiU be sustained by a large chculation." 

« mi, i ■ ^ • , , N.Y. Evangelist. 

The type is fair and handsome, and the engravinffs are select and ptp 

cuted remarkably well. They are so numerous and gfod^ls to be iS them-' 

selves a commentary."— Christian Reflector. ' ®™ 

"Its abundant and beautiful illustrations adapt it for a Familv Bible and 
will make it higlily interesting to the yonng."-6hristZ Regime J. ' 

" It is a superb publication."— Zion's Herald. 
oJITi?®.®"^''^'^"^® ,^^^ executed in a fine style of the art, and the naoer 
and the type are all that the most fastidious eye could requiVe.»-ffiero|w' 

THE PICTORIAL NBV/ TESTAMENT, 

Price One Dollar and Fifty Cents. 

THE PICTORIAL NEW TESTAMENT, 
AND THE BOOK OF PSALMS. 

Price Two Dollars. 



For Schools, Academies, and Self-Instruction 

THE 

AMERICAN DRAWING-BOOK. 

BY JOHN G. CHAPMAN, N, A. 

This Work will be published in Parts ; in the coarse of which— 

PRIMARY INSTRUCTIONS AND RUDIMENTS OF DRAWING: 

DRAWING FROM NATURE — MATERIALS AND METHODS: 

PERSPECTIVE— COMPOSITION— LANDSCAPE — FIGURES, ETC : 

DRAWING, AS APPLICABLE TO THE MECHANIC ARTS: 

PAINTING IN OIL AND WATER COLORS: 

THE PRINCIPLES OF LIGHT AND SHADE: 

EXTERNAL ANATOMY OF THE HUMAN FORM, AND COMPARATIVE 

ANATOMY: 
THE VARIOUS METHODS OF ETCHING, ENGRAVING, MODELLING, Etc. 

Will be severally treated, separately; so that, as far as practicable, each 
Part will be complete in itself, and form, in the whole, " a Manual of 
Information sufficient for all the purposes of the Amateur, and. Basis 
of Study for the Profeisional Artist, as well as a valuable Assistant 
to Teachers in Public and Private Schools ;" to whom it is especially 
recommended, as a work destined to produce a revolution in the sys- 
tem of popular education, by making the Arts of Design accessible 
and familiar to all, from the concise and intelligible manner in which 
the subject is treated throughout. 

The want of such a vro^h, has been the great cause of neglect in this 
important branch of education ; and this want is at once and fully sup- 
plied by the — 

AMERSCAN DRAW ! NG- BOOK : 

upon which Mr. Chapman has been for years engaged ; and it is now 
produced, without regard to expense, in all its details, and published at 
a price tO'place it within the means of every one. 

The Work will be published in large quarto form, put up in substan- 
tial covers, and issued as rapidly aa the careful execution of the numer- 
ous engravings, and the mechanical perfection of the whole, will allow 

B^^ Any one Part may be had separately 



Pa-icc 50 Cents eacli Part. 

i^= The DRAWING COPY-SOOKS, intended as auxiliary 
to the Work, in assisting Teachers to carry out the system of instruction, 
especially in the Primary and Elementaiy parts, form a new and valu- 
able addition to the me,ans of instruction. They will be sold at a cost 
little beyond that of ordinary blank-books. 



CHAPMAN 




BEING PART III. OF THE AMERICAN DRAWING-BOOK. 



NOTICES OF THE PRESS. 



" The nation may well be proud of thig admirable work. In design and 
execution, the ai-tist has been singularly felicitous ; and nothing can sui-pass 
the beauty, correctness, and finish of style, in which the pubUsher has pre- 
sented it to his countrymen. The book is stricfly what it claims to be — a 
teacher of the art of Drawing. The method is so thorough, comprehensive, 
and progi'essive ; its rules so "psise, exact, and clearly laid down ; and its classic 
illustrations are so skUfuUy adapted to train the eye and hand, that no pupil 
who faithfiiUy follows its guidance, can fail to become, at least, a correct 
draughtsman. We have been especially pleased with the treatise on Perspec- 
tive, which entirely sui'passes anything that we have ever met with upon 
that difficult branch of art." — Spirit of tlie Age. 

" Perspective, is one of the most difficult branches of di'awing, and one the 
least susceptible of verbal explanation. But so clearly are its principles devel- 
oped in the beautiful letter-press, and so exquisitely are they illustrated by the 
engravings, that the pupil's way is opened most invitingly to a thorough knowl- 
edge of both the elements and application of Perspective." — Hmne Journal. 

" It ti'eats of Perspective with a masterly hand. The engravings are superb, 
and the typography unsurpassed by any book with which we are acquainted. 
It is an honor to the author and pubhsher, and a credit to our common coun- 
try." — Scientific American. 

" This number is devoted to the explanation of Perspective, and treats that 
difficult subject with admirable clearness, precision, and completeness. The 
plates and letter-press of this work are executed with uncommon beauty. It 
has received the sanction of many of our most eminent ai'tists, and can scaixely 
be commended too highly." — N. ¥. Tribune. 

" This present number is dedicated to the subject of Perspective — com- 
mencing with the elements of Geometa-y — and is especially valuable to build- 
ers, cai-penters, and other artisans, being accompanied with beautiftd Olusta-a- 
tive designs di-awn by Chapman, and further simplified by plain and perspic- 
uous directions for the guidance of the student. Indeed, the whole work, 
from its undeviating simpUcity, exhibits the hand of a master. We ti"ust this 
highly useful and elevated branch of art will hereafter become an integral por- 
tion of public education, and as it is more easily attainable, so will it ultimately 
be considered an indispensable part of elementary insti-uction. Its cheapness 
is only rivalled by its excellence, and the artistic beauty of its illustrations is 
only equalled by the dignified ease and common sense ■ exemplified in the 
wi-itten directions that accompany each lesson. — Poughheepsie Telegraph." 

" The subject of Perspective we should think would interest every mechanic 
in the countiy ; indeed, after all, this is the class to be the most benefited by 
EOimd and thorough instmction in drawing." — Dispatch. 

" Permit me here to say I regard your Drawing-Book as a treasure. I was 
a farmer-boy, and it was while daily foUovring the plough, that I became ac- 
quainted with the first number of Chapman's Drawing-Book. I found in it 
just what I desired — a plain, sure road to that excellence in the Art ot Arts, that 
my boyish mind had pictured as being so desirable, the first step lowai'd which 
I had taken by malting mde sketches upon my painted ploughbeam, or iising 
the bam-door as my easel, while with colored rotten-stone I first took wessons 
from Nature. I am now at college. I have a class at drawing, and find in the 
several numbers I have obtained, the time road for the teacher also." — Exzract 
/ram a letter recently received. 



THE WORKS 

OF 

EDGAR ALLANPOE: 

WITH NOTICES OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS, 

BY J. R. LOWELL, N. P. WILLIS, AND H. W. GRISWOLD. 

In two Volumes, l2mo., vnth a Poutuait or the Authoh. 

Pkice, Two Dollars attd Fifty Cents. 

K0TICE3 OF TUE PRESS. 
" The edition is published for the benefit ot his mother-in-law, Mrs. Maria 
Clemm, for whose sake we may wish it the fullest success. It however, de- 
serves, and wfll undoubtedly obtain, a large circulation from the desire so many 
wiU feel to lay by a memorial of this singularly-gifted wiiter and unfortunate 
man." — Philadelph?j» North American. 

" Foe's writings are distinguished for vigoious and minute analysis, and 
the skill with which he has employed the sti-ange fascination of mystery and 
terror. There is an air of reahty in all his narrations— a dwelling upon partic- 
ulars, and a faculty of interesting you in them such as is possessed by few- 
writers except those who are giving tlieir own individual expenences. The 
reader can scarcely divest his mind, even in reading the most fanciful ot his 
stories, that the events of it have not actually occurred, and the characters had 
a real existence." — Philadelphia Ledger. 

"We need not say that these voluaaes will be found rich in intellectual 
excitements, and abounding in remarkable specimens of vigorous, beautiful, 
and highly suggestive composition ; they are all that remains to us ot a man 
whose uncommon genius it would be foUy to deny."— TV. Y. Tribune. 

" Mr Foe's intellectual character— his genius— is stamped upon all his produc- 
tions, and we shall place these his works in the library among those books not 
to be parted with."— iV. Y. Commercial Advertiser. 

" These works have a funereal cast as weU in the melancholy porb-ait pre- 
fixed and the title, as in the tliree pallbearing editors who accompany them 
in public They are the memorial of a singular man, possessed perhaps of as 
great mere Hterary ingenuity and mechanical dexterity of style and manage- 
ment as any the country has produced. Some of the tales m the collection 
are as complete and admirable as anything of their kind m the language. — 
Military Review. 

" A complete coUection of the works of one of the most talented and singu- 
lar men of the day. Mr. Foe was a genius, but an erratic one— he was a comet 
or a meteor, not a star or sun. His genius was that almost contradiction of 
terms, an analytic genius. Genius is nearly universally synthetic— but Foe was 
an exceiJtion to all rules. He would build up a poem as a bricklayer bmlds a 
wall ; or rather, he would begin at the top and build downward to the base ; 
and yet, into the poem so manufactured, he would manage to breathe the breath 
of life. And this fact proved that it was not all a manufacture— that the poem 
was also, to a certain degree, a growth, a real plant, taking root m the mmd, 
and watered by the springs of the soul." — Saturday Post. 

" We have just spent some dehghtful hours in looldng over these two vol- 
umes, which contain one of the most pleasing additions to our literature with 
which we have met for a long time. They comprise the works of the lEite 
Edgar A. Foe— pieces which for years have been gomg ' the rounds of the 
press,' and are now first collected when their author is beyond the reach of 
himiar praise. We feel, however, tliat these productions will hve. They 
bear tae stamp of true genius ; and if their reputation begins vnth a ' fit audi- 
ence 'ii'jugh few,' the circle will be constantly widemng, and they will retain a 
proDiiaent place in our hterature." — Rev. Dr. Kip 



mUlBlFIIlILilO)' 



9 

FOUR SERIES OF TWE-LVE BOOKS EACH, 

FROM DESIGNS BY J. G. CHAPMAN. 



First Series— Price One Cent. 

1. Tom Thumb's Picture Alphabet, in Rhyme. 

2. Rhymes for the Nursery. 

3. Pretty Rhymes about Birds and Animals, for little Boys and Girls. 

4. Life on the Farai, in Amusing Rhyme. 

5. The Story-Book for Good Little Girls. 

6. The Beacon, or Warnings to Thoughtless Boys. 

7. The Picture Book, with Stories in Easy Words, for Little Readers. 

8. The Little Sketcb-Book, or Useful Objects Hlusti-ated. 

9. History of Domestic Animals. 

10. The Museum of Birds. 

11. The Little Keepsake, a Poetic Gift for Children. 

12. The Book of the Sea, for the Insti-uction of Little Sailors. 

Second Series— Price Tw^o Cents* 

1. The A B C in Verse, for Young Learners. 

2. Figures in Verse, and Simple Rhymes, for Little Learners. 

3. Riddles for the Nursery. 

4. The Child's Story-Book. 

5. The Christmas Drcrnn of Little Charles. 

6. The Basket of Strawberries. 

7. Story for the Fourth of July, an Epitome of American History 

8. The Two Friends, and Kind Little James. 

9. The Wagon-Boy, or Trust in Providence. 

10. Paulina and Her Pets. 

11. Simple Poems for Infant Minds. 

12. Little Poems for Little Children. 

Thii'd Series— Price Four Cents. 

1. The Alphabet in Rhyme. 

2. The Multiplication Table in Rhyme, for Young Arithmeticians. 

3. The Practical Joke, or the Christmas Story of Uncle Ned. 

4. Little George, or Temptation Resisted. 

5. The Young Arithmetician, or the Reward of Perseverance. 

6. The Traveller's Story, or the Village Bar-Room. 

7. The Sagacity and Intelhgence of the Horse. 

8. The Young Sailor, or the Sea-Life of Tow Bowline. 

9. The Selfish Girl, a Tale of Ti-uth. 

10. Manual or Finger Alphabet, used by the Deaf and Dumb. 

11. The Story-Book in Verse. 

12. The Flower- Vase, or Pretty Poems for Good little Children. 

Fourth Series— Price Six Cents. 

1. The Book of Fables, in Prose and Verse 

2. The Little Casket, filled with Pleasant Stories. 

3. Home Pastimes, or Enigmas, Charades, Rebuses, Conundrums, etc. 

4. The Juvenile Sunday-Book, adapted to the Improvement of the Yoimg 

5. William Seaton and the Butterfly, with its Interesting History. 

6. The Young Girl's Book of Healthful Amusements and Exercises. 

7. Theodore Carleton, or Perseverance against Ill-Fortune. 

8 The Aviary, or Child's Book of Birds. 

9 The Jungle, or Child's Book of Wild Animals. 

10. Sagacity and Fidelity of the Dog, Blustrated by Interesting Anecdotes. 

11. Coverings for the Head and Feet, in all Ages and Couiiti'ies. 

12. Romance of Indian History, or Incidents in the Early Settlements. 



JUST PUBLISHED, 

THE LADIES OF THE COVENANT. 

MEMOIRS OF 

DISTINGUISHED SCOTTISH FEMALE CHARACTERS, 

Embracing the Period of the Covenant and the Persecution. 

By the rev. JAMES ANDERSON. 
In One Volume, l2mo., doth, Price $1.25 — extra gilt, gilt edges $1.75. 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

" It is written with great spirit and a hearty sympatliy, and abounds in. incidents of 
more than a romantic interest, while the type of piety it discloses is the noblest and 
most elevated." — N. Y. Evangelist. 

" Seldom has there been a more interesting volume than this in our hands. Stories 
of Scottish suffering for the faith have always thrilled us ; but here we have the me- 
moirs of distinguished female characters, embracing the period of the Covenant and the 
Persecution, with such tales of heroism, devotion, ti-ials, triumphs, or deaths, as rouse 
subdue, and deeply move the heart of the reader." — N. Y. Observer. 

" Many a mother in Israel will have her faith strengthened, and her zeal awakened, 
and her courage animated afresh by the example set before her — by the cloud of wit 
nesses of her own sex, who esteemed everything — wealth, honor, pleasure, ease, and 
life itself — vastly inferior to the grace of the Gospel ; and who freely oifered themselves 
and all that they had, to the sovereign disposal of Him who had called them with an 
holy calling ; according to his purpose and gra.ce."— Richmo7id, (Va.) Watchman and 
Observer. * 

"The Scotch will read this book because it commemorates their noble countrywo- 
men ; Presljyterians will like it, because it records the endurance and triumphs of their 
faith ; and the ladies will read it, as an interesting memorial of what their sex has done 
in ti'ying times for truth and liberty." — Cincinnati Central Christian Herald. 

" It is a record which, while it confers honor on the sex, will elevate the heart, and 
strengthen it to the better performance of every duty." — Richmond (Va.) Religious 
Herald. 

"The Descendants of these saints are among us, in this Pilgrim land, and we earn- 
estly commend this book to their perusal." — Plymoth Old Colony Memorial. 

"There are pictures of endurance, trust, and devotion, in this volume of illustrious 
suffering, which are worthy of a royal setting." — Ontario Repositorrj. 

" They abound with incidents and anecdotes illusti'ative of the times and we need 
scarcely say are deeply interesting to all who take an interest in the progress of Chris- 
tianity." — Boston Journal. 

"Mr. Anderson has treated his subject ably ; and has set forth in strong light the en- 
during faith and courage of the wives and daughters of the Covenanters."— iV. Y. Albion 

" It is a book of great attractiveness, having not only the freshness of novelty but 
every element of historical interest. — Courier and Enquirer. 

" The author is a clergyman of the Scottish kirk, and has executed his undertaking 
with that spirit and fulness which might be expected from one enjoying the best advan- 
tages for the discovery of obscure points in the history of Scotland, and the warmest 
sympathy with the heroines of his own creed." — Commercial Advertiser. 



JDST COMPLETED, 

EPISODES OF IISECT LIFE, 

BY ACHETA DOMESTICa. 

IN THREE SERIES, BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED, 

I. INSECTS OF SPEIISra. 

II. INSECTS OF SUMMEE. 

III. INSECTS OF WINTER. 

Each Voluine complete in Itself— Price $2.00. 

The same, elegantly colored after Nature, making a 

su^erh Gift Book for the Solyda/ys. 

Pkice •$4.00 per Volume. 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

"These volumes are highly creditable to American taste in every department of book-, 
making ; — it is impossible to give an idea of the perfection of workmanship and the ad- 
mirable keeping of parts they exhibit. In order to appreciate this, one must see the 
volumes, and having seen them, he vf ill at once transfer them to his own table, for the 
instruction and amusement of old and young." — N. Y. Observer. 

"Moths, glow-worms, lady-birds. May -flies, bees, and a variety of other inhabitants of 
the insect world, are descanted upon in a pleasing style, combining scientific informStion 
with romance, in a manner peculiarly atti-actire.'' — Comraercial Advertiser. 

"The style is the farthest possible remove from pedantry and dullness, every page 
teems with delightful matter, and the whole is thoroughly furnished with grace and 
beauty, as well as truth. One giving himself over to its fascinating charms, might read- 
ily believe himself fast on to the borders, if not in the very midst of fairy land." — Roches- 
ter Daily Democrat. 

" We have in this work deep philosophy and an endless flow of humor, and lessons 
set before us, drawn from ants, beetles, and butterflies, which we might do well to pon- 
der. We can think of nothing more calculated to delight the passing hour than the 
beautiful delineations we find in these three volumes." — Christimt Tntelligenccr. 

" The whole insect world is represented in these volumes, many of them disguised so 
as to present what politicians would call a compromise between a human and an insect 
We cordially commend these volumes to the attection of our readers."— Boston Museum. 

"A book elegant enough for the centre table, witty-enough for after dinner, and wise 
enough for the study and the school-room. One of the beautiful lessons of this work is 
the kindly view it takes of nature. Nothing is made in vain, nut only, but nothing is 
made ugly or repulsive. A charm is thrown around every object, and life suffused 
through all, suggestive of the Creator's goodness and wisdom." — N. Y. Evangelist. 

" What a monument is here raised to that wonderful, tiny race, so often disregarded, 
but which nevertheless amply repays the care we may bestow in studying their pecu- 
liarities. The interest of the reader of these volumes is well sustained by the humor 
and sprightliness of the writer." — Zion' s Herald. 

" It is a beautiful specimen of book-making. The character of the contents may be 
already known to our reade.-'S from the long and very favorable attention they have re- 
ceived from the English reviewers. The ilfustratious are at once grotesque and s;^"Eifi- 
cant." — Boston Post. 

" The book is one of especial beauty and utility, and we heartily thank the publisher 
for his enterprise in putting it within the reach of American readers. It is worthy of a 
place in every family Ubrary. Elegantly illustrated and humorously yet chastely writ- 
ten, it is calculated to amuse aid instruct all classes of readers." — Com. Advertiser. 



JUST PUBLISHED, 

In one Volume, l2mo., cloth, Pkice $1.25, 

THE 

IIGHT-SIDE OF MTUEE ; 

OR, 

aHOSTS AMD anOST-SEERS. 

BY CATHERINE CROWE, 

ATJTHOB OF " SUSAST HOPIET," " HILT DAWSON," ETC. 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 



This book treats of allegorical dreams, presentiments, trances, apparitions, 
troubled spirits, haunted houses, etc., and will be rend with interest by many 
because it comes from a source laying claim to considerable talent, and is 
written by one who really believes all she says, and urges her reasonings with 
a good deal of earnestness. — Albany Argus. 

It embraces a vast collection of marveDous and supernatural stories of su- 
pernatural occurrences out of the ordinary course of events. — N. Y. Globe. 

Jliss Crowe has proved herself a careftil and most industrious compiler. 
She has gathered materials from antiquity and from modern times, and gives 
to English and American readers the ghost-stories that used to frighten the 
young ones of Greece and Rome, as well as those that accomplish a similar 
end in Germany and other countries of modern Europe. — Phila. Bulletin. 

It is written in a philosophical spirit. — Philadelphia Courier. 

This queer volume has excited considerable attention in England. It is not 
a catchpenny aft'air, but is an intelUgent inquiry into the asserted facts respect- 
ing ghosts and apparitions, and a psychological discussion upon the reasona- 
bleness of a belief in their existence. — Boston Post. 

In this remarkable work, IMiss Crowe, who writes with the vigor and grace 
of a woman of sti-ong sense and high cultivation, collects the most remarkable 
and best authenticated accounts, traditional and recorded, of preternatural vis- 
itations and appearances. — Boston Transcript. 

This is a copious chronicle of what we are compelled to beheve authentic 
instances of communication between the material and spiritual world. It is 
written in a clear, vigorous, and fresh style, and keeps the reader in a con» 
stant excitement, yet without resorting to clapti-ap. — Daij-Book. 

The book is filled with facts, which are not to be disputed except by actual 
proof They have long been undisputed before the world. The class of facts 
are mainly of a kind thought by most persons to be "mystei'ious ;" but there 
will be foutid much in the book calculated to throw hght upon the heretofore 
mysterious phenomena. — Providence Mirror. 

This book is one which appears in a very opportune time to command at- 
tention, and should be read by all who are desirous of information in regard 
to things generally called mysterious, relating to the manifestations of the 
spirit out of man and in htm.— Traveller. 

This is not only a curious but also a very able work. It is one of the 
most interesting books of the season — albeit the reader's hair will occasional- 
ly rise on end as he tui'ns over the pages, especially if he reads alone far into 
the night. — Zion's Herald. 

A very appropriate work for these days of mysterious rappings, but one 
which shows that the author has given the subjects upon which she treats 
considerable study, and imparts the knowledge dei'ived in a concise manner. 
— Boston Evening Gazette. 

This is undoubtedly the most remarkable book of the month, and can not 
fail to interest all classes of people. — Water-Cure Jourruil. 
■ To the lovers of the strange and mysterious in nature, this volume will pos- 
sess an attractive interest. — N. Y. Tmth-Teller. 

The lovers of the marvellous will delight in its perusal.. — Com. Advertiser 



OR, 

RECOLLECTIONS OF OUR HOME IN THE WEST. 

By ALICE CAREY. 

Ilhistrated lij Daelet. One vol.^ 12mo. 



" We do not hesitate to predict for these sketches a wide popularity. 
They bear the true stamp of genius — simp'le, natural, truthful — and evince 
a keen sense of the humor and pathos, of the comedy and tragedy, of life 
in the country. No one who has ever read it can forget the sad and beau- 
tiful story of Mary Wilderraings ; its weird fancy, tenderness, and beauty ; 
its touching description of the emotions of a sick and suffering human spirit, 
and its exquisite rural pictures. The moral tone of Alice Carey's writings 
is unobjectionable always." — J. G. Whittier. 

"Miss Carey's experience has been in the midst of rural occupaticnp, in 
the interior of Ohio. Every word here reflects this experience, in the rar- 
est shapes, and most exquisite hues. The opinion now appears to be com- 
monly entertained, that Alice Carey is decidedly the first of our female au- 
thors ; an opinion which Fitz-Greene Halleck, J. G. Whittier, Dr. Griswold, 
Wm. D. Gallagher, Bayard Taylor, with many others, have on various 
occasions endorsed." — Illustrated News. 

« If we look at the entire catalogue of female writers of prose fiction in 
this country, we shall find no one who approaches Alice Carey in the best 
characteristics of genius. Like all genuine authors she has peculiarities ; 
her hand is detected as unerringly as that of Poe or Hawthorne ; as much 
as they she is apart from others and above others ; and her sketches of 
country hfe must, we think, be admitted to be superior even to those delight- 
ful tales of Miss Mitford, which, in a similar line, are generally acknowledged 
to be equal to anything done in ■Engla.nd:'—Internatlo7ial Magazine. 

" Alice Carey has perhaps the strongest imagination among the women 
of this country. Her writings will live longer than those of any other 
woman among us." — American Whig Review. 

« Ahce Carey has a fine, rich, and purely original genius. Her country 
stories are almost Mxieqvi-aXeA." —Knickerbocker Magazine. 

« Miss Carey's sketches are remarkably fresh, and exquisite in delicacy, 
humor, and pathos. She is booked for immortality."— /i?me Journal. 

"The Times speaks of Alice Carey as standing at the head of the living 
female writers of America. We go even farther in our favorable judgment, 
and express the opinion that among those living or dead, she has had no 
equal in this country ; and we know of few in the annals of English litera- 
ture who have exhibited superior gifts of real poetic genius."— TAe (Portland, 
Me.) Eclectic. 



MEN AND WOMEN 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. ■ 

By AJtSENE HOUSSAYE. 

"With Beautifully-Engraved Portraits of Louis XV. and Made, de Pompadour. 

In Two Volumes, l2mo., Cloth — Phice $2.50. 



CO N TE NTS, 



DUFRESNY. 

FONTENELLE 

MARIVAUX. 

PIRON. 

THE ABBE PREVOST. 

GENTIL-BERNARD. 

FLORIAN. 

BOUFFLERS. 

DIDEROT. 

GRETRY. 

RIVEROL. 



LOUIS XV. CARDINAL DE BERNIS. 

GREUZE. CREBILLON THE GAY. 

BODCHER. MARIE ANTOINETTE. 

THE VANLOOS. MADE DE POMPADOUR. 

LANTARA. VADE. 

WATTEAU. MLLE CAMARGO. 

LA MOTTE. MLLE CLAIRON. 

DEHLE. MAD.DELAPOPELINIERE 

ABBE TRUBLET. SOPHIE ARNOULD. 

BUFFON. CREBILLON THE TRAGIC. 

DORAT. MLLE GUIMARD. 

THREE PAGES IN THE LIFE OF DANCOURT. 
A PROMENADE IN THE PALAIS-ROYAL. 
LE CHEVALIER DE LA" CLOS. 
"A series of pleasantly desultory papers — neither history, biography* 
criticism, nor romance, but compounded of all four: always lively and 
graceful, and often sparkling with esprit, that subtle essence which may be 
so much better illustrated than defined. M. Houssaye's aim in these sketch- 
es — for evidently he had an aim beyond the one he alleges of pastime for 
his leisure hours — seems to have been to discourse of persons rather cele- 
brated than known, whose names and works are familiar to all, but with 
whose characters and histories few are much acquainted. To the mass of 
readers, his book will have the charm of freshness ; the student and the 
man of letters, who have already drunk at the springs whence M. Houssaye 
has derived his inspiration and materials, will pardon any lack of novelty 
for the sake of the spirit and originality of the treatment." — Blaceiwood. 



IN PRESS, 



PHILOSOPHERS ANI) ACTRESSES. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



MISS CHESEBRO'S NEW VVOUK. 

DREAM-LAND BY DAYLIGHT; 

A 

PAI^ORAMA OF EOMAKCE. 

Bt CAROLINE CHESEBRO. 

Illustrated hy Dabley. One vol., 12mo. 



" These simple and beautiful stories are all highly endued with an exquisite 
perception of natural beauty, with which is combined an appreciative sense of its 
relation to the highest moral emotions." — Albany/ State Register. 

" There is a fiae vein of pure and holy thought pervading every tale in the vol- 
ume ; and every lover of the beautiful and true will feel while perusing it that 
he is conversing with a kindred spirit." — Albany Evening Atlas. 

" The journey through Dream-Land will be found full of pleasure ; and when 
one returns from it, he will have his mind filled with good suggestions for practi- 
cal life." —Rochester Democrat. 

" The anticipations we have had of this promised book are more than realized. 
It is a collection of beautiful sketches, in which the cultivated imagination of the 
authoress has interwoven the visions of Dream-Land with the realities of life." 

Ontario Messenger. 

" The dedication, in its sweet and touching purity of emotion, is itself an ear- 
nest of the many 'blessed household voices' that come up from the heart's clear 
depth, throughout the book.'" — Ontario Repository. 

" Gladly do we greet this floweret in the field of our literature, for it is fragrant 
with sweets and bright with hues that mark it to be of Heaven's own planting." 

Couj-ier and Enquirer. 

" There is a depth of sentiment and feeling not ordinarily met with, and some 
of the noblest faculties and affections of man's nature are depicted and illustrated 
by the skilful pen of the authoress." — Churchman. 

" This collection of stories fully sustains her previous reputation, and also gives 
a brilliant promise of future eminence in this depai'tment of literature." 

Tribune. 

"We find in this volume unmistakeable evidences of originality of mind, an 
almost superfluous depth of reflection for the department of composition to which 
it is devoted, a rare facility in seizing the multiform aspects of nature, and a still 
rarer power of giving them the form and hue of imagination, without destroying 
their identity." — Harper's Magazine. 

"In all the productions of Miss Chesebro's pen is evident a delicate perception 
of the relation of natural beauty to the moral emotions, and a deep love of the true 
and the beautiful in art and nature." — Day-Book, • 



A NEW AND POPULAR VOLVMTO. 

TALES AND TRADITIONS 

OF 

H U N G A E Y. 

BY THERESA PULSZKY. 

With a Portrait of the Author. 

In One Volume, Cloth— Price, One Dollar. 

The above contaius, in addition to tlie English publication, a new Pkepace, and 

Tales, now first printed from the manuscript of the Author, .who has a direct interest in 

the pubhcatiou. 



CONTENTS. 



1. The Baron's Dausfhter. 

2. The Castle of^ipsen. 
3: Yanoshik, theTlobber. 

4. The Free Shot. 

5. The Golden Cross of Korosfo. 

6. The Guardians. 

7. The Love of tha Angels. 

8. The Maid and the Genii. 

9. Ashmodai, the Lame Demon. 
10. The Nun of Rauchenbach. 



11. The Cloister of Manastir. 

12. Pan Twardowsky. 

13. The Poor Tartar. 

14. The Maidens' Castle. 

15. The Hair of the Orphan Girl. 

16. The Rocks of Lipnik. 

17. Jack, the Horse-Dealer. 

18. Klinsjsohr of Hungary. 
19 Yanosh, the Hero. 

20. The Hungarian Outlaws. 



NOTICES OF THE ENGLISI-I PRESS. 

" The old fairy lore of the world, though as familiar to us as our own names, never 
loses its chann, if it only be told to new tunes — if Cinda-ella's godmother presents herself 
to the over-worked and ill-used child in a national costume — if we find ' Ogier the Dane' 
sitting, waiting for the time when he is to arise and deliver the world, in some fresh sub- 
terranean cavern — if we learn that there have been other seekers for the gi-eat carbuncle, 
besides the party in the ' Far West,' whose pilgrimage was so impressively told by Mr. 
HawthoiTie ; and other ' free shots' besides the one done into music by Weber in his op- 
era. We are as glad to dream of finding the lost 'Golden Cross of Korosfo' as if we had 
not been already set a-yearning by Moore for 

*The round towers of other daj'S,' 
buried deep in the bosom of Lough Neagh. But, in addition to these universal stories — 
old as time, and precious as beliet — Madame Piilszky has a special budget of her own. 
The legend of ' The Castle of Zipsen' is told with racy humor. Whimsically absurd, too, 
are the mati-imonial difiiculties of Pan and Panna Tvi'ardowsky, as here related ; wliile 
the fate of Vendelin Drugeth reveals how ' the wild huntsman' may be varied, so as to 
give tliat fine old legend a more orthodox and edifying close than the original version 
possesses. Most interesting of all are ' The Hungarian Outlaws.' " — London Athenaum. 

" This work claims more attention than is ordinarily given to books of its class. Such 
is the fluency and correctness — nay, even the nicety .and felicity of style — with which 
Madame Pulszky writes the Englisli language, that merely in this respect the tales here 
collected form a curious study. But they contain also highly suggestive illustrations of 
national literature and character. To not a few of the ' traditions' of Hungary a living 
force and significance are still imparted by the practices as well as the belief of her peas- 
antry and people, and none were better qualified than the author of this book to give fa- 
miliar and pointed expression to these national traits The pride and power of the 

landed noble, in contrast with the more gaudy but less real power of the court — the con- 
tinual struggle of the classes in immediate proximity with the noble — and (that fancy so 
peculiar to rude ages in every counti-y) the calling in of the common robber to redress 
the unequal social balance — are among the prominent subjects of the traditions related by 
Madame Pulszky with much beauty and vivacity. The tale or tradition which holds a 
middle place between these and the purely fantastic, is that which describes the home- 
life of the peasant, and, at the same time, satisfies the love of distant adventure, which he 
cultivates as he follows his plough." — London Examiner. 

" Freshness of subject is invaluable ui literature — Hungary is still fresh ground. It has 
been trodden, but it is not yet a common highway. The tales and legends are very vari- 
ous, from the mere traditional anecdote to the regular legend, and they have the sort of 
interest which all national traditions excite." — London Leader. 











^U^'i 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Nov. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



^\ ■ . ^ \- '.•» 




